128 LIT is a multimedia project based in New York City. It is a re-orienting and re-familiarizing space dedicated to increasing the circulation of bold and fearless voices and artists. 

128 LIT is a multimedia project based in New York City. It is a re-orienting and re-familiarizing space dedicated to increasing the circulation of bold and fearless voices and artists who recognize and interrogate the compounding effects of coloniality, oppression, and their entangled structures, wounds, and aesthetics, making new pathways for seeing and situating within an international context. 

Founded in February 2022, 128 LIT has intended to exist as a mode that locates joy and pain, that collapses the distances between genres, languages, people, and places.  

In 2023, 128 LIT won CLMP’s Best Debut/Magazine Award for their inaugural print issue. By the winter of 2023, the platform began to expand into a press through an International Chapbook Prize. Concurrently, 128 LIT coordinated a “What is home?” project that situated and interrogated coloniality, power structures, movements between varying socio-literary-artistic modes, and AI and its impact on precarity and literature.

In the summer/fall 2024, 128 LIT contributors and their pieces published in 128 LIT—Yana Kane, Rachael Daum, Dmitry Blizniuk, Natalia Rubanova, Yuliia Iliukha, and Hanna Leliv—were selected for Deep Vellum’s 2025 Best Literary Translations Anthology. 

In October 2024, winner of 128 LIT’s 2023 International Chapbook Prize, My Women, by Yuliia Iliukha and translated from Ukrainian by Hanna Leliv was released before it was shortlisted for the 2025 EBRD Literature Prize, among renowned writers such as Nobel Prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk, László Krasznahorkai, and Ivana Bodrožić. 

In August 2025, 128 LIT announced a new (Re)Familiarize Project that intends to become an accessible intervention against the normalization of domination as a colonizing, structural, and socio-emotional weapon. 

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128 Lit

General call

Translation - Poetry

Translation - Fiction 

Translation - Non-fiction 

128 LIT is open for submissions from October 1, 2025 through January 31, 2026 for its new (Re)Familiarize Project.
The 128 LIT (Re)Familiarize Project will publish work(s) as an accessible intervention against the normalization of domination as a colonizing, structural, and socio-emotional weapon. We hope this becomes a collective opening to look, feel, interact, de-familiarize, re-imagine, and (Re)Familiarize. 
We are accepting previously unpublished work(s) in any of the following forms:

  Fiction
  Non-fiction & essays 
  Poetry 
  Cross-genre / hybrid work
  Artwork
  Audio/Multimedia works 
  Film

Length: 

  Up to 8 poems

Format:

  Text-based submissions should preferably be in Microsoft Word or PDF format, double-spaced, in Times New Roman, size 12 font.
  For submissions that include images/design/artwork, low resolution is ok. If accepted, we will request high resolution images.
  For audio/film works, submitters must have all necessary permissions for its publication on 128 LIT’s website. 
  For translated work, include the piece both in its original language and its English translation. Also, ensure you have obtained all necessary permissions from the original author/publisher for the translation and its publication.

Submitting Your Work:
Simultaneous Submissions: We encourage simultaneous submissions, just ask that you withdraw  the piece promptly upon acceptance elsewhere.  
Response time: Due to the volume of submissions and our limited resources, we are unable to respond to all submissions individually. If you haven’t heard from us within six months, your piece was likely not selected. Please note that many contributors have been declined in one submission window and accepted in another.
Upon Publication:
All accepted work(s), similar to 128 LIT’s What is Home? project, will appear on 128 LIT’s open access online platform. 128 LIT pays a small honorarium for accepted pieces.

128 Lit

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