Poet Jessica Helen Lopez, a Rural Women's Collective Fellow at Justice for Migrant Women and a Voices and Faces Project workshop alum.

I Am Rural America:
A call for poetry submissions.

The Louder Together team at The Voices and Faces Project, an award-winning non-profit storytelling project and testimonial writing program, is joining with the Rural Women's Collective Fellows at Justice for Migrant Women to solicit poetry submissions that speak to the statement "I Am Rural America."

We are seeking poetry that helps us shine a light on outdated notions of who represents rural America…confront the economic, racial, and social injustices too often experienced by immigrant and farmworker persons…and highlight aspects of rural life that are too often ignored by the media and the public. We seek especially to elevate the writing of Black, Brown and Indigenous persons, and other Communities of Color, whose stories are too often disappeared in conversations about rural populations.

We welcome poetry that speaks hard truths. But we also seek writing that focuses on your hopes for a more just and equitable rural America.

The Louder Together team at The Voices and Faces Project will then weave together lines from accepted submissions to craft "I Am Rural America," the second crowdsourced poem in our 2021 Louder Together poetry and performance series. Contributors to "I Am Rural America" will be fully credited; submissions are due by March 30, 2021.

We can't wait to read your submission!

“I Am Rural America”
Submissions are due by March 30, 2021.

About Louder Together, The Voices and Faces Project's crowdsourced poetry and performance series.

An initiative of The Voices and Faces Project, Louder Together seeks to create poetry and performances that speak to a range of human rights and social justice issues. Each crowdsourced poem in the series utilizes the voices of those who have lived through or witnessed an injustice, and uses their words as a call to social and political action. We work closely with trusted allies to reach communities where they are in order to create work that is inclusive, representative and change-focused. Lines of poetry from selected submissions are woven into a final, crowdsourced piece which is then brought to life, through a video, live performance, or through one of The Voices and Faces Project's literary publications. So go ahead: Get loud with us!