Call for Poems

Rhyme and Rhythm: An Anthology of High School Sports Poems edited by Dr. Sarah J. Donovan

Authors and poets of young adult literature, thank you for your interest in this call for contemporary sports-themed poems, e.g., issues and conditions today’s youth are experiencing. Please look over the details of the project below and reach out with any questions at YAsportspoems@gmail.com: shareable Flyer PDF.

Overview

At the heart of many high schools in America is sports. Indeed, part of the push to reopen schools this fall even under threats of the virus spreading is the need (financial or spiritual) for a fall sports season. For some student-athletes, school sports are about pride, loyalty, legacy, and the opportunity to go to college, but there are some student-athletes who are happy to ride the bench all season or play their role as a fan just to be part of something.

There are wonderful young adult novels that explore the complexities of being a high school athlete in young adult sports fiction — Hoops (Dean Myers), Mexican White Boy (de la Pena, 2008), Whale Talk (Crutcher, 2009), The Running Dream (Van Draanen, 2011), Boy 21 (Quick, 2012), Fat Angie (Charlton-Trujillo, 2013), The Art of Holding On and Letting Go (Lenz, 2016), and, among many more, After the Shot Drops (Ribay, 2018), but where are poems about and for high school students, young adult poetry to follow our students into their young adult lives? Poems that represent their contemporary experiences with #metoo, BLM, social media, and changing inter-scholastic regulations?

With poetry, the reader is arguably a more active participant. The white space is an invitation to bring experiences to the page alongside the print, where every word, line break, space, punctuation (or absence thereof) counts — the art of an athlete lives in poetry’s movement and agility.

When people think of a book of sports poetry, they likely expect poems about the competition (winners and losers), maybe poems about power, strength, and stamina. William Carlos Williams described poetry as a “field of action” where the emotions, movements, and experiences of life are played out. Indeed, poetry is the perfect form to explore being a high school student across America, facing different sets of rules not only for sports but for existence — race, culture, gender, sexuality, class, religion– navigating being a student and an athlete in America.

Like sports, poems have different sets of “rules” but also like sports, poetry invites and celebrates the unexpected, the beautiful, the tragic. Poems play with words, shape, craft, and mimic actions like the punch of a boxer or the glide of an ice skater. Their sweat may be fear or doubt; the “tear” may mean cries of pain or a “tear” in an ACL. Their body is part of their identity when they are jogging in a neighborhood or when they are stereotyped by a fan. The line breaks in a poem may represent a wish to break from a family legacy or scholarship that may not come. And what about the bodies that don’t fit into neat rhyme and meter because the sport they want to compete in isn’t for girls or because as transgender their body is not written into the rules to compete. Free verse may be a resistance– there’s still structure, but it is up to the poet to decide the “rules,” disruption, and art.

High school athletes know that their being does not begin and end at school. Their “field of action,” their competition is on the bus home, their part-time job, the dinner they make for their siblings while parents work the night shift, the depression that they might be self-medicating with “borrowed” meds — all while doing homework to stay eligible for the next game. And for the athletes that get cut or can’t afford the team fees, they can still be found in driveways and parks or studying YouTube videos for training tips because sport is an escape, a joy, a way of being.

This anthology of young adult sports poetry uses the white space and ink to realize the many ways of being a student-athlete reaching out, up, down, and across the pages of high school.

Contemporary educators and ELA teachers are recognizing and acknowledging that the commonly taught classics, written mostly by privileged, White, cis-gender males, often reflect biases against people of color, genders, and those of lower socio-economic status. In response, young adult literature authors have maintained that YA literature in high school libraries and classrooms can increase relevancy by providing opportunities for contemporary voices to enter classroom conversations, challenge biases, and value the lives of all students.

This book will build on and extend short form themed young adult literature — Black Enough (Zoboi); Meet Cute and A Thousand Beginnings and Endings (Oh & Chapman); Fresh Ink and Because You Love to Hate Me (Amerie); Here We Are and Don’t Call Me Crazy (Jensen); Our Stories, Our Voices (Reed), and Hungry Hearts (Chapman) — by offering high school librarians and educators a collection of sports-themed poems that explore the intersections of sports and identities in the current school-social climate.

In the young adult poetry market, this book will find its way into book store aisles, library shelves, and classrooms for the student-athlete who needs to be seen in the books they read — one poem studied in English class, a few poems on the bus ride home, maybe a notebook inspired by the poem in the anthology.

Archer Publishing is seeking poems from authors and poets of young adult literature for this sports poem anthology to address contemporary sports-themed topics that are of high interest to high school students and relevant to their lives. See “Penance” by Sherman Alexie; “Dribbling” by Kwame Alexander; and “Trouble Ball” by Martin Espada.

Audience

For readers 12 -18: imagine the poem is going to be read in high school classrooms to inspire student writing or available in a classroom library for student to pick up and read during class, on the bus to a game, or in the cafeteria during lunch. This anthology may even make its way into a team book club.

Form

Topical, progressive, thematic, and very entertaining in fiction, speculative fiction, and nonfiction/memoir; any form (haiku, sijo, sonnet, free verse, sestina, etc.); lyric or narrative.

Inclusive-Affirming Content

This anthology will be inclusive and affirming representations of high school student-athletes, which means young adult readers must experience in the poem, as Rudine Sims Bishop advocates, windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors. Thus, we are especially looking for #OwnVoices poets written by BIPOC and LGBTQ authors.

Poem speakers may include BIPOC and LGBTQ and/or non-LGBTQ speakers; however, to be representative of American high school students, we are looking for poets/poem speakers of any race, nationality, sexuality, ethnicity, class, (dis)ability, religion, and geography (e.g. rural, urban, suburban). The poem can be multilingual.

An inclusive poem is an accessible, identity-affirming poem.

Subject: Sports-themed

• Imagine student-athletes during COVID-19 and Black Lives Matters protests doing their sport for therapy or an escape.
• What about the girl who isn’t allowed or welcomed to compete on the boys’ wrestling team or the transgender girl who runs in a community that filed a lawsuit to change the conference rule that allows high school athletes to compete in sports corresponding with their gender identity;
• Think about the athletes who did not make the team but continue to play in the parks and study YouTube videos to improve.
• Think about athletes who may be overlooked or a sport that is under-celebrated.
• Consider the high school athletes who have to take care of their siblings, carry their family legacy to compete, work a part-time job, and study into the night to be eligible to play.
• Push boundaries of imagination. Vulnerable. Glorious. Grief-stricken. Hilarious.

Submission Details

Submission Format:

A. Send no more than two poems, of no more than 40 lines, in Word format, justified as you’d like it read/published, line spaced at 1.5; Garamond font at 10. At the top of the document, include the title of work, author’s name, email address, phone number, and word count. All poems can be in the same document.

B. Send a separate cover page (also in Word) that includes the following:

• full name,
• email address,
• affiliations (organizations, institutions),
• bio (i.e., geography, degrees, writing experience, publications; include a note about your sports life), and
• positionality statement (i.e., how your identity intersections, community, and experiences inform the poem); we would like this anthology to reflect the cultural, racial, linguistic, gender, and ability difference of high school students across this country and welcome #ownvoices poets; what contemporary issues are represented in your submissions.

All poem proposals and questions should be submitted to the editor at YAsportspoems@gmail.com.

Selection: Editor reserves the right to select the poem suiting the theme and aim of the anthology and her decisions shall be final. A group of five advisory editors made up of educators, poets, and scholars will advise the selection. Final selection shall be made after the deadline for submissions is over. Decision for selection or rejection would be intimated to an individual in due course of time.

Copyright and Acknowledgement: If a poem is submitted to us it would be deemed that either the poet holds necessary copyright or they have taken due permission from its first publisher. All copyrights pertaining to the project Rhyme & Rhythm: An Anthology of High School Sports Poems anthology shall remain retained by Archer Publishing. All copyrights pertaining to the individual works shall be retained by the author/poets.

Availability: The anthology is to be listed on various online stores and like the other books of Archer Publishing, this collection too shall be made available worldwide. The anthology shall be published in both print and electronic formats.

Compensation: The contributors shall receive 2 physical copies of the anthology.

Looking forward to your submissions!

Best wishes!

Dr. Sarah J. Donovan
Assistant Professor of Secondary English Education
Oklahoma State University
YAsportspoems@gmail.com

Editor Bio: Sarah J. Donovan’s professional interests include ethical, inclusive curriculum, methods, and assessment practices in secondary English classrooms. She is a former junior high English language arts teacher of fifteen years and an Assistant Professor of Secondary English Education at Oklahoma State University. She wrote Genocide Literature in Middle and Secondary Classrooms (2016) and the young adult novel, Alone Together (2018). She is a co-editor for the online journal Writers Who Care. Dr. Donovan was the Books in Review columnist for The ALAN Review (2019) and serves as a state representative and board member for The Assembly on Literature for Adolescents of NCTE (ALAN). She is the founder of a blog and poetry writing community for teachers, Ethical ELA, and has contributed chapters to The Best Lesson Series (Talks with Teachers, 2018), Queer Adolescent Literature as a Complement to the English Language Arts Curriculum (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), Moving Beyond Loss to Societal Grieving (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), and Contending with Gun Violence in the English Language Classroom (Routledge, 2019).

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