Black and gay in the UK

TEAM ANGELICA PUBLISHING is looking for exciting new voices for its ground-breaking forthcoming anthology, provisionally-titled Black and Gay in the UK and scheduled for release in Autumn 2014.

Award-winning novelist and screenwriter John R Gordon is putting together an anthology for the Team Angelic imprint, provisionally entitled Black and Gay in the UK.

“The aim is to create a volume that captures something of the rich variety of black gay men’s experiences in the UK, primarily as seen by black gay men themselves, but also including narratives, reflections and perceptions of non-gay family members and friends and non-black partners and friends.

We want to put together something that is in part in dialogue with those ground-breaking 80s African-American gay anthologies, Brother to Brother and In The Life, but that disrupts monolithic assumptions and speaks determinedly to a British and contemporary setting.

Is a volume celebrating in print the challenges and triumphs of black gay men in the UK needed in 2013? We think so. Whatever social progress there has been, black gay men still rarely see work of any sort that puts their lives and experiences centre-stage, and we hope this will be a chance to do so, and that this book will become some sort of resource, and at the least will capture an exciting moment in history.

We’re actively looking for stories, poems, (auto)biographical writings and think-pieces both serious and light-hearted about black gay experience in the UK. We hope to include the words of the young and less formally-expressed alongside those of the elders, whose insights into how perceptions around race and sexuality have changed over time are of particular interest; the insights of those more recently-arrived alongside those born and raised here; and the wisdom of those who are already known alongside that of the Future Legends.

Do check out our website, Team Angelica, for details and to see what we do.

Love,

John

The business end:

Work should be previously unpublished and not more than 5000 words in length. Excerpts from longer works are acceptable so long as they stand up in themselves.

If you’d like to send us something, please save it as a doc or docx or rtf file and email it to john@teamangelica.com. Please name your file as ‘[storytitle] by [author]’. In the subject-line on the email please say ‘submission for anthology, [title] by [author’s name]’. Within the document please number pages, and in the header say ‘[title] by [author]’.

A nominal payment will be offered for work accepted, along with a non-exclusive contract with Team Angelica Publishing and author copies of the anthology.