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Call for Contributions — August 2026

Voices That Vanish: On the Disappeared and the Silenced

Editorial Note

On 30 August, the United Nations marks the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, honoring those who have vanished and affirming the right to truth and remembrance.

This issue of The Pasticheur joins that observance by calling attention not only to those who have been forcibly taken, but also to those silenced, erased, or forgotten by power, indifference, or time.

We invite artists, writers, and thinkers to explore the condition of disappearance in all its forms: the lost body, the censored voice, the buried archive, the quiet extinction of languages, and the persistence of memory that resists being undone.

We seek work that dares to listen where silence has been imposed, that reimagines mourning as testimony, and that transforms absence into presence through creative act and ethical attention.

What We Seek

Submissions are welcome in English (works in other languages should include an English translation).

We welcome:

  • Visual art and photography addressing erasure, invisibility, or resistance to forgetting.

  • Literary and philosophical texts that engage with memory, trauma, and truth-telling.

  • Creative nonfiction and hybrid forms that recover voices, histories, or places made to disappear.

  • Short films (under thirty minutes) exploring silence, loss, or reappearance.

Deadline and Publication

Deadline: June 15 2026

Publication: August 2026, coinciding with the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances.

Selected works will appear in the digital August issue and may also be featured in related virtual events and conversations on art, ethics, and memory.

How to Submit

Email submissions addressed to Mireille Rebeiz & Jorge R. G. Sagastume, Editors (editor@the-pasticheur.com) with the subject line “Voices That Vanish – Submission.”

Include a short cover letter, an author or artist bio (80–100 words), and your work in the appropriate format following the submission guidelines.

Call for Submissions

Special Issue: A Nation of Many: 250 Years of Reckoning and Renewal

Publication: July 2026

Deadline: March 1, 2026

In 2026, the United States will mark the 250th anniversary of its founding. Anniversaries invite reflection, and they also invite critique. What does it mean to commemorate a nation’s birth when the questions of international policy, justice, belonging, and power remain urgent and unresolved? What does it mean to measure 250 years of promises and betrayals, of violence and renewal, of voices silenced and voices rising?

For this special issue of The Pasticheur, we seek work from writers, poets, artists, and thinkers across all traditions and geographies. We want to gather a chorus of perspectives that will not only revisit the country’s origins but also confront where it stands today. We invite contributions that explore freedom and exclusion, democracy and disenfranchisement, myth and memory, the local and the global.

Visual and literary works will appear side by side, opening a dialogue across form and medium. We welcome fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, critical essays, visual art, photography, sculpture, short film, and multimedia. Above all, we seek voices that complicate the story, that bring contradiction and clarity, that imagine what it means for the United States to stand at this threshold 250 years later.

Please submit through [email]. Include a short bio and indicate the title of the special call you are submitting to.

With this issue, we hope to create a space where reflection meets resistance, and where memory opens toward possibility.