CALL FOR PROPOSALS
Q+ Public aims to revitalize a queer public sphere in which intellectuals, activists and artists can explore questions that are critical to our diverse LGBTQ communities. Q+ Public books will combine reportage, engaged research, interviews, critical reflection, visual art, design and creative writing to address complexity, controversy and strong opinion while sparking our imaginations.
Q+ Public seeks proposals for short books that explore a range of urgent queer, trans and non-binary cultural and political topics. We are interested in innovative strategies such as dialogic, collaborative and experimental forms. Our goal is to bring together voices that rarely share the same stage.
Authors, artists and editors will be drawn from diverse parts of our worldwide LGBTQ+ communities. Q+ Public books will reflect intergenerational points of view and dialogue across racial, class, gender and sexual differences.
Who We Are, Who You Are
We are a multigenerational, multiracial group of writers, artists, community leaders, activists and scholars. We live as and study a broad range of queer sexual and gender identifications, community affiliations, and creative/intellectual practices.
We seek same! Writers, artists and original thinkers with something to say, from professors and graduate students to journalists, performers, community activists and queer agitators.
Where We Come From
Q+ Public looks to OUT/LOOK: National Lesbian and Gay Quarterly for historical inspiration. OUT/LOOK offered a model for bridging academic inquiry and broader community, for bringing together art and writing, and for tackling controversial subject matter. Q+ Public also grows out of the 2017-18 multi-prong project OUT/LOOK & the Birth of the Queer in which 38 participants responded creatively to the content of OUT/LOOK’s seventeen issues.
E.G. Crichton and Jeffrey Escoffier, two of the six founders of OUT/LOOK in 1987, started Q+ Public in 2018 in conversation with Kimberly Guinta of Rutgers University Press. They pulled together the present Q+ Public editorial board of nine people.
What are We Looking for?
Q+PUBLIC is looking for proposals for small books of up 50,000 words that address compelling and unresolved topics of interest to national and global queer communities. The books we include in the series will make innovative use of collaborative and dialogical forms, multiple viewpoints, formal experimentation, and rich visual content in the form of photographs, drawings, comics, designed text, etc. Text and image should be in conversation throughout the book. These books should engage readers from a general audience.
What Themes?
Anything that deserves the attention of Queer communities, especially themes that have been under the radar. Here are a few examples of subjects we’d like to see addressed in future books:
- Immigration and asylum for queers
- Shifting lesbian and non-binary identities
- Transmasculine genders
- Queers and the rise of fascism and autocratic states
- Queers and the environmental crisis
- Queer aging and its impact on our communities
- Queers and disability
- Contemporary policing of sex and desire
- Pleasure activism and sexualities
- Queers and incarceration
- Trans (non-normative) parenting
Examples of Formats:
- Difficult dialogues or paired essays that respond to each other
- Graphic narratives or nonfiction
- Several short essays on different aspects of a topic
- Translation from one medium to another (e.g. performance to text and image)
- Interview-based oral conversations
- Epistolary exchanges
- Call and response multi-author round table
- Annotated manual, mapping, an atlas
- Prose poetry
- An experimental cookbook
HOW TO FORMAT YOUR PROPOSAL
Each proposal for a small book should include these elements:
Topic: What is the topic of the content and the purpose of the intervention—a sort of abstract or executive summary of the content.
Format: What form and structure will define the book?
Visuals: What will the visuals be, and how will they be in conversation with text components? We encourage the art to be integrated at the beginning, not added as an illustrative after thought.
Outline/Table of contents: Provide a table of contents or brief outline of the book.
Who is Your Targeted Audience?
Similar titles: Identify and describe a few similar book titles — especially small books — and also compare your project to foundational texts on your topic. What does your book add that is new or different?
Author biography: Include a short biography for each author that summarizes career trajectory, publications, exhibitions, and relationship to the book topic.
Promotion and Marketing: Identify your audience. What can you specifically do to promote the book? Discuss what you can and will do (without publisher assistance), given your current resources. Identify conferences, events, and organizations that might directly reach your audience.
NOTE: The Q+ Public editorial board reviews proposals regularly at our monthly meetings. Send your proposal to series editor E.G. Crichton (egc@ucsc.edu). We will respond to you, offer feedback, and indicate whether and how to go forward.