Author: lootedvoices_z13dcw

Follow us on Twitter to know when the next Roundtable will be. 

Would you like to read your work at an upcoming Monthly Roundtable? We consider ‘newly published’ to be those who have been published in the prior or forthcoming 12 months.  Books excerpts are welcome, as are essays, poetry and fiction featured in literary journals.  Submit your interest here.

Each month, we host a virtual Literary Roundtable spotlighting 4-6 newly published Looted Voices writers reading their own work.  To encourage being present in the moment, these events will not be archived online.  We are inclusive of everyone and invite those who may not identify as having a Looted Voice to attend as an ally. 

We are the children, grandchildren and descendents of people who were colonized and terrorized; forcibly displaced from homes by active conflict or economic conditions that made our own lands uninhabitable; stolen to be sold into slavery and servitude.  We are ourselves migrants, often forced, worrying and wondering how our children and grandchildren will know their roots.  We have ended up on shores and in lands that our ancestors wouldn’t have called their own.  For too many of us, our DNA has been imprinted with the wounds and scars of those who came before us.    

Now, we try and speak out about ourselves, the injustices that once did and still do confront us.  We try and simply be.  Long established systems and institutions keep us from ever stepping foot in their doors.  We are silenced before we can begin.  In continuing the tradition where once our bodies and lands were looted, now it is our Voices. 

Our imprinted DNA, though, holds too the capacity to resist, to persevere, to keep speaking out.  We will not quit and we cannot quit because we are indebted to those who came before us and honor those who will come after us.  If current spaces keep their doors shut for us, we create our own.  

This is Looted Voices.

Looted Voices is a virtual space for writers who have long been underrepresented, marginalized and tokenized by the mainstream publishing industry. Here, our Voices can simply be, without needing to carry the additional burden of how we will be heard or perceived by the mainstream gaze.