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ISSUE NINE - WOUNDS

Submission dates 1st – 14th February 2024

Working alongside editor Louise Mather, our guest readers for this issue are JP Seabright, Taz Rahman and Dr Chris Laoutaris.

Please send up to 3 UNPUBLISHED poems and/or artwork/photographs to acropolisjournal@gmail.com

Note, you are welcome to submit to both categories.


The theme for Issue Nine is Wounds - we would love to see your unique and surreal explorations of this theme, delving into grief, trauma, mythology, cosmos, love, death, past lives, ancestry, ritual, corporeality, scars and healing. Whether emotional, physical, brutal, gory or delicately intricate, does time heal all wounds or is it not at all as we are told? Unveil broken truths and afflictions, vengeance and panaceas, take us on a journey into the undertow, weave us a fairy tale or pull back everything to create us a tiny piece of magic from the night's dark waters.

We would love to hear from new and emerging writers and under-represented voices as well as established writers. If you have contributed to earlier issues, we adore your work and are always happy to read more, but consideration may be first given to writers and artists we've not featured before.​


Please attach poetry as .doc or .docx. If your poem has any specific formatting or shape please ALSO send a PDF or JPG. Please send artwork/photographs in jpg format, ideal image size is a few mb. We prefer to read poems under two pages, but we’re flexible and happy to consider hybrid pieces.


Any font is fine - if in doubt, Times New Roman 12pt single spaced (A5 may be easier to work with to maintain line breaks when publishing). If your poem has any spacing/formatting (including justified text) we will also make a PDF file available to download as our site may display them slightly differently. On our mobile site, some line breaks may be different.

Simultaneous submissions are fine - just let us know if they are accepted elsewhere. We aim to reply to all submissions within six weeks of the submission deadline, if you haven’t heard back after that, please feel free to get in touch. Issue Nine publication is planned for spring 2024.


Please be reassured we will do everything to respect writers and artists. Submissions are free and we will always treat you and your work with care and kindness. You retain the rights to any poems published. Please credit Acropolis Journal in any future publications. Issues will be published on our site and available from our archives. Unfortunately, we can't offer payment at this time. If you want to donate money to our editor please use the tip jar below. Thank you.

If you would like to please include a bio in a cover note (approx 50-100 words). Tell us as much or as little as you want to about you and your poems, if there’s a particular one you want us to focus on, let us know. Please include content warnings, as these will be used on our site, and if you are submitting artwork/photography/hybrids, please include a written description so we can display this. If you have any questions or other requirements for accessibility, please feel free to message. If you can't attach a .doc/docx, please paste your work into the body of your e-mail. If we ask you to send more, we mean it! We look forward to reading your submissions.

GUEST READERS


JP Seabright

JP Seabright is a queer disabled writer and editor living in London. They have four solo pamphlets published and two collaborations, encompassing poetry, prose and experimental work. Widely anthologised, they are also published in Rialto, One Hand Clapping, Pamenar Press, Fourteen Poems, Culture Matters and 14 Magazine. They have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Forward Prize. More info at https://jpseabright.com/


Traum/A is an abecedarian catalogue of experimental, visual and prose poetry on the causes and symptoms of trauma. Reflecting both the light and dark of human experience, the work veers from harrowing to honesty and humour. Published by fifth wheel press on 16th May 2023. https://jpseabright.com/traum-a/


Vispo “The Journey” can be found in Issue Five:

https://acropolisjournaluk.wixsite.com/archive2022/jp-seabright-the-journey


Taz Rahman

Cardiff based Taz Rahman’s first poetry collection ‘East of the Sun, West of the Moon’ is forthcoming in February 2024 from Seren Books. He has been published in Poetry Wales, Interpreter’s House, Bad Lilies, South Bank Poetry, Anthropocene, Propel, Atrium, Abridged, The Lonely Crowd, Atrium, Acropolis Journal, Planet – The Welsh Internationalist, Honest Ulsterman, Culture Matters and in various anthologies. He serves as the reader’s committee chair for Poetry Wales and as an editor for the climate emergency themed literary journal Modron (link – www.modronmagazine.com). He was one of the judges for the 2021 Poetry Wales Pamphlet Competition and is an alumnus of the 2023 Hay festival ‘Writers at Work’ development scheme and Literature Wales’ 2021 writer development programme. In 2022, he was shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award. In 2019 he founded Wales first Youtube poetry channel Just Another Poet (link - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiFKAIVPhbk-D2gEFxo8tWA), which has been a recipient of Books Council of Wales commissions for the last two years.


Find two poems in in Issue Eight:

https://acropolisjournaluk.wixsite.com/acropolisjournal/taz-rahman-two-poems


Dr Chris Laoutaris

Dr Chris Laoutaris is a biographer, historian, poet, Shakespeare scholar and Associate Professor at The Shakespeare Institute (University of Birmingham), in Shakespeare’s birthplace of Stratford-Upon-Avon. He is the author of Shakespeare’s Book: The Intertwined Lives Behind the First Folio, published by HarperCollins’ William Collins imprint, which tells the story of the creation of the 1623 First Folio, and which is a BBC History Magazine Book of the Year, a BBC Radio 4 Front Row Non-Fiction Book of the Year, and a Financial Times Best Summer Book. In addition to numerous academic publications, he has published Shakespeare and the Countess: The Battle that Gave Birth to the Globe (Penguin), which was shortlisted for the Tony Lothian Prize for Biography, was an Observer Book of the Year, Telegraph Book of the Year, one of the New York Post’s ‘Must-Read Books’, and one of the Daily Telegraph’s top ten history holiday reads. Laoutaris’s first poetry collection, Bleed and See (Broken Sleep Books), was shortlisted for the Eric Gregory Poetry Awards and he is the co-editor with Dr Paul Edmondson, Aaron Kent and Prof. Katherine Scheil of Anne-thology: Poems Re-Presenting Anne Shakespeare (Broken Sleep Books), the world’s first anthology of poems for Anne Shakespeare, which is a Telegraph Poetry Book of the Year and a Guardian Poetry Book of the Year.

Laoutaris is the recipient of the Morley Medal in English, and two prestigious Post-Doctoral Fellowships (a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellowship and a Birmingham Fellowship), and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He has reviewed for numerous academic publishers and journals; has written for the Financial Times, Sunday Express, Times Higher Education Supplement, BBC History Magazine, and the Times Literary Supplement, among others; and has provided historical and Shakespearean consultancy to the Royal Shakespeare Company and numerous film and documentary production companies. His media work includes BBC1’s The One Show, BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, BBC Midlands, BBC Radio London, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Newstalk Radio Dublin, RIK Television Cyprus, Notimex (Mexico’s largest media agency), a British Council/Evans Wolfe Media documentary with Ben Crystal, HistoryHit TV with Dan Snow, Not Just The Tudors with Suzannah Lipscomb, and the BBC Shakespeare Festival.

He is the Co-Founder and Co-Chair of the Shakespeare Beyond Borders Alliance and the Co-Founder of the EQUALityShakespeare (EQUALS) initiative.


Anne-thology:

https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/anne-thology


Bleed and See is an elegy for Chris Laoutaris’ brother, George Laoutaris, whose premature death is grasped so close in the poet’s hands, it passes with the beauty of the last of the summer roses. Chris Laoutaris quotes from an army of rich sources, from Desiderius Erasmus to Denise Levertov, with the inner strength to match them: “wisdom acquired through suffering is a kind of gift”. Bleed and See is an otherworldly, moon-drenched collection which, like the best elegies, leaves us changed.


https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/chris-laoutaris-bleed-and-see

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