SINE THETA MAGAZINE’S 5TH ANNUAL WRITING CONTEST
Submissions period: 14 May to 7 July 2023
Our upcoming sinθ #28 marks another year of Sine Theta! To celebrate, we are bringing back our summer writing competition for its fifth iteration. We are delighted to announce Lan Samantha Chang (author of The Family Chao) as this year’s Fiction judge and Ching-In Chen (author of recombinant) as this year’s Poetry judge.
Submit by 7 July 2023 for a chance to be published in sinθ #28 and receive feedback from established writers! Thanks to our Patreon supporters, we’re able to offer the winner in each category a $200 USD cash prize.
We’re accepting entries for both fiction (prose) and poetry. We invite you to reflect on the following three prompts as inspiration for your pieces. You may reflect on the prompts separately or as a collective, drawing themes and ideas that resonate with you. Entries must engage with the prompt(s), but can do so either directly or indirectly.
There is no submission fee.
You may only submit one entry per category, so send us your best work!
“Sound, like light, is energy comprised of waves, a series of perceived reflections and refractions that orient us in time and space. Sound reflects our relation to other bodies and objects. This sonic data is central to a poetic strategy that I call “decolonial echolocation”—a method of bodily knowing, a somatosensory epistemology of embodied navigation of coloniality for those who were not meant to survive. It is the diasporic physiological process of sensing distant or invisible objects by sound waves emitted back to the emitter, to draw on the dictionary definition of echolocation.”
——Tao Leigh Goffe, “Unmapping the Caribbean: Toward a Digital Praxis of Archipelagic Sounding,” archipelagos (December 2020)
“Inside Sparrow, sounds accumulated. Bells, birds and the uneven cracking of trees, loud and quiet insects, ones that spilled from people even if they never intended to make a noise. […] Sound had a freedom that no thought could equal because sound made no absolute claim on meaning.”
——Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016)
Email sinethetamag@gmail.com with “Writing Competition - NAME - CATEGORY” as the subject line. Attach your submission as a PDF or Word document, with the document title as “CATEGORY - WORK TITLE”. Do not include your name on the document, as entries will be judged anonymously. If you are entering a poetry and a fiction piece, please submit each piece separately via email.
Please include the following completed form with your submission in the body of your email:
Lan Samantha Chang is the author of The Family Chao, winner of an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction. A twenty-fifth anniversary edition of her first collection, Hunger: A Novella and Stories, will be published in August, 2023, by W.W. Norton & Company. She is also the author of All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost and Inheritance, which won the PEN Open Book Award. Her fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, and The Best American Short Stories. She's received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the American Academy in Berlin. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.
Ching-In Chen is the author of The Heart's Traffic (Arktoi/Red Hen Press, 2009) and recombinant (Kelsey Street Press, 2017). Born of Chinese immigrants, they are a Kundiman, Lambda, Callaloo and Watering Hole Fellow and a member of the Macondo and Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundations writing communities. A community organizer, they have worked in the Asian American communities of San Francisco, Oakland, Riverside and Boston, as well as helped organize the third national Asian Pacific American Spoken Word and Poetry Summit in Boston. Chen is also the co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (South End Press, 2011) and Here Is a Pen: an Anthology of West Coast Kundiman Poets (Achiote Press, 2009).
Poetry: "Autumn, as a Color" by Lily Zhou
Short fiction: "Pleasantries" by Daisuke Shen
Judged by Yanyi and Jamie Marina Lau
Poetry: "Untitled, 2020 (after Ren Hang)" by Alice Liang
Short fiction: "The Wedding Dress" by Celeste Chen
Judged by Chen Chen and Rebecca F. Kuang
Poetry: “etymology of ‘moon’” by Stella Li
Short fiction: “The Girlfriend Place” by Ariel Chu
Judged by Sally Wen Mao and K-Ming Chang.
Poetry: “Self-Portrait as the Dead Fish in Some Guy’s Tinder Profile Picture” by Erin Jin Mei O’Malley
Short fiction: “Auntland” by K-Ming Chang
Judged by Sharlene Teo and Nancy Huang.