*Submissions are now closed. Please check back at the end of the month to view the zine!
Last year, GJLP and TLC launched the Trans Joy Zine, a zine dedicated to the joy and passions of trans youth across the country. This year, we are continuing the zine with a new edition: The Black Trans Joy Zine!
We know it’s a particularly rough time to be a trans or nonbinary young person in the U.S., especially for our Black trans youth who face specific challenges as a result of their intersectional identities. As anti-trans lawmakers continue to debate your right to play sports and access medical care on the national stage, we are also witnessing this fearmongering and spread of misinformation play out on social media, a place where many of us go to seek content to spark joy.
That’s why we’re inviting you to submit to our Black Trans Joy Zine! We want to interrupt the cycle of doom and gloom we’ve seen on social media these past few years by curating an intentional collection of joyful, uplifting content created by Black trans and nonbinary youth artists under the age of 25! If you’re looking for inspiration to get you started, check out last year’s Trans Joy Zine.
This zine will be primarily housed digitally on our website – which means you have a ton of liberty in terms of the type of content to submit. Spoken word poetry about the joys of being Black and trans? Great! A video meditation to help ground Black trans people in their bodies when things are tough? Yes! Submissions can be video, audio, photo, painting, drawing, digital illustration, poetry, short-form writing, or anything else you can imagine. The only restriction is that your submission needs to be able to be uploaded to social media in some way, whether as a static post or a reel. We’ve shared some Artist and Content Guidelines here on how to do that.
To submit your work, please fill out the form below. Feel free to send in as many submissions as you like (within reason!) Make sure to set sharing permissions for your submission to public so our team can view and download it. Submissions are due on Friday, March 1, 2024. If your submission is selected, you will be contacted by March 11, 2024. Included artists will be paid $250.