Call for Art and Article Submissions for the 2023 Certain Days: Freedom for Political Prisoners Calendar

Call for submissions for the 2023 Certain Days: Freedom for Political Prisoners calendar.

The Certain Days collective will be releasing our 22nd calendar this coming autumn. In lieu of a 2023 theme, we are doing an open call for abolition-related art and article submissions to feature in the calendar, which hangs in more than 6,000 homes, workplaces, prison cells, and community spaces around the world. We encourage contributors to submit both new and existing work. We especially seek submissions from people in prison or jail, so please forward this call to any prison-based artists and writers.

Why no theme?, you ask. Since 2008, the Certain Days collective has developed a theme for each year’s calendar. During our “off season” this year, the collective has been weighing the decision of whether to continue this project or wrap it up. After much deliberation, we are going full-steam ahead with a 2023 calendar and decided to do an open call for submissions. While “transition” may be a great theme for us, at this moment, we leave it to you, trusted artists and authors, to submit what you think would be a great fit for our 22nd calendar! Download as PDF

Deadline: Friday, June 14, 2022

FORMAT GUIDELINES

ARTICLES
• 400-500 words max. If you submit a longer piece, we will have to edit for length.
• Poetry is also welcome but needs to be significantly shorter than 400 words to accommodate layout.
• Please include a suggested title.

ART
• The calendar is 11” tall by 8.5” wide, so art with a ‘portrait’ orientation is preferred. Art need not fit those dimensions exactly.
• We are interested in a diversity of media.
• The calendar is printed in colour and we prefer colour images.

Due to space limitations, submissions may be lightly edited for clarity and concision, with no change to the original intent.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

1. Send your submissions by June 14, 2022, to [email protected]
2. ARTISTS: You can send a low-res file as a submission, but if your piece is chosen, we will need a high-res version of it for print (600 dpi).
3. You may send as many submissions as you like. Chosen artists and authors will receive a free copy of the calendar and promotional postcards. Because the calendar is a fundraiser, we cannot offer money to contributors.Prisoner submissions are due July 1, 2022, and can be mailed to:Certain Days:

c/o Burning Books
420 Connecticut Street
Buffalo, NY 14213

ABOUT THE CALENDAR

The Certain Days: Freedom for Political Prisoners Calendar is a joint fundraising and educational project between outside organizers in Montreal, New York, and Baltimore, and current and former political prisoners, including currently imprisoned Xinachtli (s/n Alvaro Luna Hernandez) in Texas. We were happy to welcome founding members Herman Bell and Robert Seth Hayes (Rest in Power) home from prison in 2018, and David Gilbert in 2021, each of whom spent over forty years behind bars. All of the current members of the outside collective are grounded in day-to-day organizing work other than the calendar, on issues ranging from legal aid to community media, radical education to prisoner solidarity. We work from an anti-imperialist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, feminist, queer- and trans-liberationist position. All proceeds from the calendar go to abolitionist organizations working for a better world.