Because the writing family of Hindman Settlement School and the community surrounding campus who experienced the July 2022 flood are both so broad, only the smallest gathering of poems, stories, essays, photographs, and experiences could be included in the anthology Troublesome Rising: A Thousand-Year Flood in Eastern Kentucky, which came out September 2024 from Fireside Industries, an imprint of University Press of Kentucky.
As such, the Settlement School has established a companion website for the anthology: TroublesomeRising.org. With this website, we want to include more stories, voices, and experiences connected to this historic flood and other climate crisis events. We want this website to not only expand the documentation of the flood and act as a more inclusive archive than the anthology can be on its own, but the website can act as a portal through which the broader world can learn about what we experience and learn about it from our own words and art.
WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR
Like the anthology, we’re looking for pieces that are from a range of voices and experiences and explore this topic from a variety of angles. We want poems, fictional stories, essays, photos, art, videos, songs, and hybrid pieces that blur across categories.
The work can be about our specific flood in July of 2022, or about other historic floods, fictional floods, or metaphorical floods affecting Appalachia. We’re interested in discussions of the causes of increasing natural disasters, how communities survive the tragedies and recover, the personal and cultural impact of these events. We’re interested in how these occurrences in Appalachia connect to other places around the world. We’re interested in the micro and the macro. We’re interested in exploring the connecting threads.
Submission Specifics:
- Up to 5 poems (Word or PDF document)
- Up to 12 pages prose (Word or PDF document)
- Up to 10 photos / art files (300 dpi in JEP or PNG format)
- Up to 3 videos / sound clips (a link to its location on YouTube or other hosting site – do not send the file yet)
If you have multiple genres you’d like to submit in, you can submit to two.
While we will give priority to folks who have direct relationship to the July 2022 flood and/or Hindman Settlement School, and to those who are not published in the anthology, submissions are not limited to just those writers and artists. We want to see everyone’s work that connects to these issues and topics.
Submission deadline: August 1, 2025
Works submitted to Hindman Settlement School will be published solely on the Troublesome Rising companion website. No compensation will be provided to the creator of the work.
