We're a storytelling platform and community for artists, writers, and activists working towards collective liberation. We teach workshops and publish decolonized writing related work.

We’re a community of artists, writers, and activists across multiple creative concentrations working towards our collective liberation.

Founded in 2023 by Sherisa de Groot, Literary Liberation focuses on our writing, our wellness and our liberatory practices. We center the Global Majority and all further marginalized communities within that majority in all that we do. We want to access and activate our radical imagination within ourselves and in one another.

Lit Lib Daily

Not just words. These magazines publish paintings, comics, illustrations, and other visual art alongside or instead of traditional text-based work.

Magazines That Publish Comics, Art, or Other Visual Works

Literary Liberation

In collaboration with Memoir Land, we invite you to submit first person narrative essays that explore writing as a transformative and liberatory practice. We seek to illuminate the ways in which writing can be a powerful tool for personal and collective liberation, challenging oppressive structures and creating new possibilities for understanding, resistance, and healing.

We are interested in submissions that explore writing as:

A form of resistance and testimony.
A method of personal and collective healing.
A means of challenging dominant narratives.
A space for reimagining social realities.
An act of self-determination and empowerment.

Only submissions by writers of the Global majority will be considered for publication.

We accept work from anyone, but give priority to writers of the Global majority, especially those at the intersection of any marginalized/erased identity markers within that community, including but not limited to disability, gender expansive, LGBTQIA+, immigrant, refugee, Indigenous, working class, neurodivergent, and religious minority identities. We strongly encourage submissions from those who have historically been excluded from traditional publishing spaces and whose voices have been systematically silenced.

Freedom Ways Essay

Show us the inner life of writing. We are interested in work that takes writing seriously as an artistic practice — not simply a profession, identity, or industry. We want essays that examine how writers actually make work: sentence by sentence, draft by draft, year by year.<div><br></div><div>What does it mean to develop a voice? How do writers learn rhythm, structure, tension, precision, image, scene, or emotional clarity? What habits, questions, failures, reading practices, contradictions, and experiments shape the work itself?</div><div><br></div><div>We are especially drawn to pieces that engage deeply with craft without becoming instructional or prescriptive. We are less interested in productivity advice and more interested in the intellectual, emotional, and creative process of becoming a writer.</div><div><br></div><div>Suggested topics: learning how to write, voice and style, revision and rewriting, literary influence and imitation, experimentation and failure, writing across genres, etc.<br><div><br></div><div>___</div><div>Word count: 2000 words minimum&nbsp;</div><div>Compensation: $150 USD.
___<br><div>
Our mission is to support writers in decolonizing their craft, their relationships with community, and their ways of being. We seek work that pushes beyond conventional boundaries, honors ancestral wisdom, and contributes to our collective liberation. We are particularly drawn to submissions that explore how writing can be a tool for social change, community healing, and the dismantling of oppressive systems.

We accept work from anyone, but give priority to writers of the Global majority, especially those at the intersection of any marginalized/erased identity markers within that community. </div></div></div>

How to be a Writer

How does artistic practice change during political, ecological, emotional, and social rupture? How do writers continue making meaning during collapse? What responsibilities do artists hold during genocide, authoritarianism, displacement, climate crisis, economic precarity, and collective grief? What becomes possible in moments of fracture?<div><br></div><div>First-person essays, experimental, hybrid work, manifesto-style pieces, long-form interviews are accepted.</div><div><br></div><div>Perspectives from Black, Brown, immigrant, diasporic, disabled, queer, working class, and historically marginalized writers of color are prioritized.</div><div><br></div><div>Suggested topics: reimagined community, archives as resistance, despair versus imagination, literature and political responsibility, survival and creativity, etc.<br><div><br></div><div>___</div><div>Word count: 2000 words minimum&nbsp;</div><div>Compensation: $150 USD.<div>___
Our mission is to support writers in decolonizing their craft, their relationships with community, and their ways of being. We seek work that pushes beyond conventional boundaries, honors ancestral wisdom, and contributes to our collective liberation. We are particularly drawn to submissions that explore how writing can be a tool for social change, community healing, and the dismantling of oppressive systems.

We accept work from anyone, but give priority to writers of the Global majority, especially those at the intersection of any marginalized/erased identity markers within that community. </div></div></div>

Writing through Collapse

<div>Share your original essays and criticism about labor, class, exhaustion, and literary survival. We want work that examines the realities of sustaining a creative practice under capitalism—the visible and invisible labor surrounding writing.</div><div><br></div><div>Tell us about day jobs, debt, burnout, freelancing, instability, caregiving, teaching, rejection, administration, artistic exhaustion, and the practical realities that shape a literary life.</div><div><br></div><div>Perspectives from Black, Brown, immigrant, diasporic, disabled, queer, working class, and historically marginalized writers of color are prioritized.</div><div><br></div><div>Suggested topics: class and literary access, unpaid literary labor, disability and productivity culture, the economics of publishing, artistic ambition and survival, etc.</div><div><br></div><div><div>___</div><div>Word count: 2000 words minimum&nbsp;</div><div>Compensation: $150 USD.<div>___
Our mission is to support writers in decolonizing their craft, their relationships with community, and their ways of being. We seek work that pushes beyond conventional boundaries, honors ancestral wisdom, and contributes to our collective liberation. We are particularly drawn to submissions that explore how writing can be a tool for social change, community healing, and the dismantling of oppressive systems.

We accept work from anyone, but give priority to writers of the Global majority, especially those at the intersection of any marginalized/erased identity markers within that community. </div></div></div>

The Writer at Work

<div>We seek essays about archives, erasure, ancestry, preservation, memory, and cultural inheritance.</div><div><br></div><div>How do writers document lives, communities, histories, and traditions that institutions often neglect, distort, or erase? What survives? Who is allowed permanence? What does it mean to remember collectively?</div><div><br></div><div>Perspectives from Black, Brown, immigrant, diasporic, disabled, queer, working class, and historically marginalized writers of color are prioritized.</div><div><br></div><div>Suggested topics: forgotten writers and artists, preserving family/community histories, oral storytelling traditions, censorship and disappearance, intergenerational storytelling, etc.<br><div><br></div><div>___</div><div>Word count: 2000 words minimum&nbsp;</div><div>Compensation: $150 USD.<div>___
Our mission is to support writers in decolonizing their craft, their relationships with community, and their ways of being. We seek work that pushes beyond conventional boundaries, honors ancestral wisdom, and contributes to our collective liberation. We are particularly drawn to submissions that explore how writing can be a tool for social change, community healing, and the dismantling of oppressive systems.

We accept work from anyone, but give priority to writers of the Global majority, especially those at the intersection of any marginalized/erased identity markers within that community. </div></div></div>

Who Gets Remembered

<div>We are interested in first-person essays, conversations, and criticism about literary influence, formation, obsession, and inheritance.</div><div><br></div><div>We want work exploring the books, writers, libraries, classrooms, traditions, and reading experiences that shaped who you became or continue to become—creatively, politically, emotionally, or intellectually.</div><div><br></div><div>This isn’t a surface review of your favorite books.</div><div><br></div><div>Perspectives from Black, Brown, immigrant, diasporic, disabled, queer, working class, and historically marginalized writers of color are prioritized.</div><div><br></div><div>Suggested topics: translation and multilingual reading, discovering literature outside institutions, reading politically, formative reading experiences, etc.</div><div><div><br></div><div>___</div><div>Word count: 2000 words minimum&nbsp;</div><div>Compensation: $150 USD.<div>___
Our mission is to support writers in decolonizing their craft, their relationships with community, and their ways of being. We seek work that pushes beyond conventional boundaries, honors ancestral wisdom, and contributes to our collective liberation. We are particularly drawn to submissions that explore how writing can be a tool for social change, community healing, and the dismantling of oppressive systems.

We accept work from anyone, but give priority to writers of the Global majority, especially those at the intersection of any marginalized/erased identity markers within that community. </div></div></div>

The Books That Build Us

Literary Liberation is looking to expand our volunteer team to include someone to lead our social media efforts. I want to preface this with stating that our goal is primarily to work with someone to use social media in an ethical and sustainable way. We do not want to ‘flood the feed’ and it’s important that whomever joins our team, understands the difference between content and providing real value.&nbsp;<div><br></div><div>They will take over the creation of social media graphics, the curation, scheduling and posting to the Lit Lib social feeds, aid in editing videos from Lives, interviews, and workshops, support in the design of our site resources (e.g. PDFs and downloads), and will occasionally open Zoom classrooms. This position runs for a 6 month term and is renewable.&nbsp;</div><div><br></div><div>As our team lead is in Amsterdam, the ideal candidate will be located in Europe and/or generally/flexibly available for European daytime hours (CET). This doesn’t discount folks from anywhere else in the world, so please feel encouraged to apply!</div><div><br></div><div>Preference goes to community members of color. </div>

Literary Liberation

Highlights

About

Featured Call

Freedom Ways Essay

Appears in collections