Olongo Africa has opened submissions for Black Psalms of the Shivering Ones, an anthology exploring winter and seasonal life in Black Canadian experience, edited by Jide Salawu and forthcoming from Wilfrid Laurier University Press. The call invites Afro-Canadian and Black poets in contiguous locations like the United States to submit work engaging with winter imaginaries—blizzards, frostbite, solstice, snowbirds, auroras, tundra, and the friction between tropical memory and diasporic cold. Salawu, author of Contraband Bodies (2025) and current Black postdoctoral fellow at Toronto Metropolitan University’s English Department, positions the anthology within the tradition of Afro-Canadian poetry collections like AfriCANthology (2022), The Great Black North (2013), and The Black Prairie Archives.

The anthology asks what kind of shivers Canadian cold produces for Black subjects—political, economic, social—and seeks poems that explore seasonality’s role in shaping Afro-Canadian life. Where are the enduring tropic images of root home alongside the voltage of diasporic cold? What about summer/winter nostalgia, the pain of newcomers settling into frigidity, the mourning of those who didn’t survive the transition? The call explicitly references poets like Dionne Brand, whose Winter Epigrams evokes the weather dilemma in the Canadian diaspora (“-winter suicide-/shall I do it then….”), and Claire Harris’s The Conception of Winter, which frames the season as gendered and fearful even amid determined joy.

Submission Guidelines:

  • Open to Afro-Canadian or Black poets in the US invested in winter imaginaries of Canadian life/Black diaspora
  • Up to 3 original short poems (maximum 50 lines per poem) in English
  • All forms welcome: sonnets, epigrams, duplex, ghazals
  • Poems cannot be previously published
  • Include bio of no more than 70 words
  • Deadline: April 14, 2026
  • Submit to: [email protected] with subject line “Black Psalms ‘Last Name'”

Contributors receive a complimentary copy of the anthology, with honorarium currently being secured. This is an opportunity for African poets in North America to contribute to the evolving canon of Afro-Canadian poetry and explore how climate, geography, and displacement shape diasporic consciousness.