Tell Your San Diego or Tijuana Story, Whether it Be Sunshine or Noir
San Diego City Works Press Is Taking Submissions until June 7th for its 20-Year Anniversary Anthology, Sunshine/Noir III: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana
With the same ethos as the one that spurred The Jumping-Off Place as a space for San Diego writers, activists, and community members to tell stories about our region that don’t usually get heard, San Diego City Works Press was founded nearly a couple decades ago by a 100% non-profit collective to publish books by local writers both beginning and experienced scribes, poets, and artists that go beneath the postcard image of our tourist marketing campaigns and official pablum to, as I wrote in a recent San Diego Union-Tribune piece, address “the issues faced by those living in the borderlands, the struggles and triumphs of working-class San Diegans, and a wide range of other themes from the challenges of parenting and the politics of food, to the anticipatory grief of our era of catastrophic climate change.”
We launched our journey with the publication of an anthology, Sunshine/Noir: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana, in 2005 and marked our 10-year anniversary with another collection, Sunshine/Noir II. In these compilations, we featured pieces by prominent literary figures like Jimmy Santiago Baca, Sandra Alcosser, Marilyn Chin, Steve Kowit, and Mike Davis as well as the work of other established local and aspiring writers.
Like The Jumping-Off Place, as an outfit, City Works Press doesn’t operate by market values and doesn’t care about the pecking order of the established commercial and academic literary world nor the pressures of corporate and/or advertising-funded media outlets. Thus, in a brutal landscape where most small presses die in due time, we have managed to keep rolling against the odds. We have done so partially because our weird, semi-potlatch model isn’t designed around profits as we aim to give as much away as we can and hope for some form of reciprocity by way of the community.
In that spirit, City Works Press is currently accepting submissions of poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, photography, and art for our 20-year anniversary anthology, Sunshine/Noir III: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana, due out in 2025. Send us your best shout and join in the celebration.
If you have a poem, story, creative and/or documentary non-fiction, or a piece of art or photography that captures the realities of San Diego County or the Tijuana border region that lurk beneath the booster and tourist stereotypes of “America’s Finest City,” please submit. We are open to work from both professional and beginning writers as long as it is excellent and has a story to tell.
We want work that maps the endangered natural landscape and sniffs out grit, ecstasy, and irony in the midst of the theme-park city. We seek writing that reveals buried histories, deals with the border, work, race, class, gender, sexuality, urban and natural environments, decadence, tragedy, sex, death, beauty, ugly beauty, and, yes, alienation under the sun. Interviews, profiles, texts that explore the hidden corners of San Diego—alternative histories, figures, places, activism—would be welcome. Everything from traditional realism to formal innovation is welcome in fiction and our tastes in poetry and non-fiction are equally eclectic.
Submit your best poems, fictions, or non-fictions of ten pages or less via email in a Word document or .pdf to: cityworkspress@earthlink.net
DEADLINE: June 7th, 2024
