Want to know more about what we’re looking for in the 38th edition of The Cypress Dome? Here are a few words from our genre leads:
Jamie Sub Laban – Poetry Editor
We’re looking for poems evident of your singular humanity. Inked on evidence of a writer who soaks in life’s sublimities and wrings themself out onto the page. We want work that is observant and transgressive, destructive to cliché, and constructive of new worlds, rooted in the sensory. We want you to transform the abstract, rather than be formed by abstractions, and most of all, as readers and as poets, we want to feel.
We’d love to read your work!
Mariem Touati – Fiction Editor
The fiction team is leaning in: let your voice be heard! We want that daring draft you’re unsure of that’s been sitting in the back of your mind. Be bold, be creative, but most importantly, push past your limitations! Bring us characters so realistic and dynamics so charged that they step right off the page. We’re scouring for daring premises paired with restrained storytelling, pieces that render us hopeful ponderers during and long after reading! So take the leap of faith, submit that story (you know which one), and give us a piece that makes us forget we’re reading.
Skyelar Wiedrich – Creative Nonfiction Editor
It’s the story, not the situation, that matters in nonfiction. Your narrative doesn’t have to center tragedy—tell me about the last time you brushed your teeth or tied your shoes, as long as you can connect it to the broader world in a compelling way. We’re looking for work that is raw, vulnerable, and present. We want to archive what writers are thinking and feeling at this specific moment in history.
Ash Brooke – Art Director
There is no language as precise yet all-encompassing as art. Whether it be written or drawn, art is a conversation.
The visual medium is how we communicate when words are not enough, when our experiences cannot be boiled down to sentences written on paper. With this in mind, I ask you to communicate with us. Tell us what you’ve seen and where you’ve been. Experiment. Surprise and inspire us. Tell us a million stories with just one glance. Tell us one we’ve never heard before.