03/06/2017
Dear Alumni and Students:
We look forward to receiving and reading your stories, and work on putting them together to publish.
We want to check in with you, and further communicate what we are hoping for, as we put this publication together.
Each one of us have narratives, stories, and come from such diverse cultures - whether it’s from pockets across the United States, or stories of immigration from other countries. We have diverse families, whether it’s adoption stories, stories from separated parents, the nuclear family. We all share the story of gender - how our gender has shaped our way of processing and viewing the world. We all have a narrative that intersects with race and a unique family culture. Our official Call to Papers is only an outline to inspire you and invite you to share your unique narrative, and how it has shaped the way you think of and consider your identity.
Perhaps you feel as though you lack a particularly expansive story. We want to draw out the reality that you have had moments in your life that have felt in a limbo of identity: a sort of crossroad where you questioned whether two seemingly contrasting stories placed you in a limbo of identity— or, feeling invisible.
In reflecting and sharing our stories, we partake in an assertion that we are visible. And this space between borders of identity is calling to be personified, reimagined, and spoken about.
Please consider sharing a piece about your narrative. We hope this publication can be a means to celebrate, grieve, fall in love with the pull and push of visibility and invisibility, and call upon the intersection of diverse narratives, coexisting in our community.
This is a difficult conversation to be part of, and requires a courage to confess that many of us have found ourselves in a sort of empty space, where identity does not fit into the structures of being surrounding us. We hope this can be a start to the conversation.
We look forward to hearing from you through these next days, our submission deadline has been extended to this Saturday night at midnight.
Blessings to you,
~ IITY Staff
