Best of Mandela Open Call

The Ujima Press WIRE is currently accepting pitches for written pieces, under a new vertical: Best of Mandela. The WIRE is a Boston-based, monthly, digital publication that runs on our newsletter and website. 

Drawing inspiration from a political project that would have re-incorporated Roxbury, Mattapan, and large parts of Jamaica Plain, Dorchester, and the South End as their own new, Black, self-determined city (Mandela, MA), we are looking for stories in this geography that profile, report on, even interrogate, a subject you love. 

Mandela represents a lost future; Mandela also represents a still-relevant geography that race and capital continue to operate within and across—while developers and city bureaucrats reproduce a “New Boston” within a sterile, smooth, ascendant, white imaginary, a Black reality persists in and around much of Mandela’s outline, circumscribing not just our residence but also our sites of creative production, performance, and economy. Finally, Mandela complicates a local geography in how it ties together African, Caribbean, African-American, and many other identities and models for liberation-seeking in Black communities. 

We welcome reported profiles, features, interviews, essays, and poetry.

This vertical will center Black organizing, institutions, informal collectives, and economies, surfacing critical perspectives on the successes, failures, and vicissitudes of standing up distinctly Black modes of making within a city that banks on cultural whiteness.

We hope to cover a geography of neighborhoods and communities that self-determine--that create--their world. 

Stories should have a strong connection to at least one of the following: Boston’s Black, Brown, working-class communities; solidarity politics; economies; liberation narratives; urban policy/planning; or arts/culture. 

What to submit:

• Local criticism and reportage (profiles and features) of cultural organizing, art, economies, or community-led development;

• Historical/analytical essays surveying Black historicity, radicality, and/or futurity!

• (Black) speculative fiction and planning!

• Interviews (with organizers, artists, culture workers, worker-owners, etc, from within our geography of interest);

• Poems that excavate politics or inspire us towards liberation.

We are looking for:

• Bold, thoughtful writing with a distinctive voice that articulates clear and compelling critical perspectives.

• Approachable, lively language (don't be afraid to pitch us style!).

• Stories from the South End, Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan, and Jamaica Plain -- there's some leeway here, but the story needs to connect to a Black geography!

We welcome first-time writers, mid-career folks, and experienced professionals, with a preference for writers from marginalized backgrounds. 

Compensation:

Articles featured in the WIRE receive compensation ranging from $200 to $300, with the amount determined by factors such as length, prior publication, and format. We'll be publishing stories in October and November of this year. 

If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to alula@ujimaboston.com.