The West is under attack! Protect your frontier and deliver your ‘isms [alive] to collect your bounty!
While the frontier is often typecast through an old western lens, your frontier can be whatever setting or undiscovered territory you want to explore. This can be a place near to you or a place not yet imagined.
Your frontier is boundless, without boundaries or borders that limit where or how far your writing can go. Think modern westerns (Greg Neri’s adaption Concrete Cowboy), cross-genre (Jordan Peele’s Nope), or even traditional/revisionist western (Jeymes Samuel’s The Harder They Fall).
Leave no ‘ism’ unturned or territory underexplored. Whether through the region, era, or genre, there are no restrictions defining what, when, or where your frontier exists. Just show us, How the West Was (or still is) Black.
How to collect your bounty:
- Choose your bounty (see below)
- Document your western encounter with an ‘ism (racism, homophobia, etc.)
- Turn in your bounty via Submittable
Bounties (Choose Your Earnings):
$15 — Haiku, Short Poems (<14 lines), Micro Fiction
(under 100-300 words)
$25 — Prose, Short Story, Flash Fiction, Creative-Nonfiction
(under 1000 words)
$50 — Hybrid, Experimental, Essays, Long-Form Pieces.
(under 2000 words)
$50 — All Artwork
(includes comics, paintings, etc.)
*Each submission should contain up to 3 poems, 3 samples of artwork, or 1 flash fiction piece, etc. (begin a separate submission should your work exceed these)*
And for the first time (ever) this issue of Awake will be in print!
Deadline: July 31, 2023
Issue 1 / Issue 2 / Issue 3 / Issue 4
Are you a Black author interested in having your work published in the Awake? Complete your submission here.
