Call for 2027 Art and Article Submissions
Our Duty to Win
It is our duty to fight for our freedom.
It is our duty to win.
We must love each other and support each other.
We have nothing to lose but our chains.
― Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography
The Certain Days: Freedom for Political Prisoners Calendar collective will be releasing our 2027 calendar in September 2026. The theme for 2027 is “Our Duty to Win” and all submissions should seek to address what this phrase means in the context of today’s struggle and the timeliness of Assata’s words to us 40 years after they were written. So please submit your abolition-related art and articles for consideration for the calendar, which hangs in more than 6,000 homes, workplaces, prison cells, and community spaces around the world. We encourage contributors to submit new work whenever possible.
We especially seek submissions from people in prison or jail, so please forward this call to any prison-based artists and writers.
Deadline: Sunday, May 31, 2026
ARTICLES
Due to space limitations, submissions may be lightly edited for clarity and concision, with no change to the original intent.
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- 400-500 words max. If you submit a longer piece, we will have to edit for length.
- Poetry is also welcome but needs to be significantly shorter than 400 words to accommodate layout.
- Please include a suggested title.
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- The calendar is 11” tall by 8.5” wide, so art with a ‘portrait’ orientation is preferred. Art need not fit those dimensions exactly.
- We are interested in a diversity of media.
- The calendar is printed in colour and we prefer colour images.
2. ARTISTS: You can send a low-res file as a submission, but if your piece is chosen, we will need a high-res version of it for print (600 dpi).
3. You may send as many submissions as you like. Chosen artists and authors will receive a free copy of the calendar and promotional postcards. Because the calendar is a fundraiser, we cannot offer money to contributors.
c/o Burning Books
420 Connecticut Street
Buffalo, NY 14213
The Certain Days: Freedom for Political Prisoners Calendar is a joint fundraising and educational project between outside organizers across North America and current and former political prisoners, including currently imprisoned Xinachtli (s/n Alvaro Luna Hernandez) in Texas. We were happy to welcome founding members Herman Bell and Robert Seth Hayes (Rest in Power) home from prison in 2018, and David Gilbert in 2021, each of whom spent over forty years behind bars. All of the current members of the outside collective are grounded in day-to-day organizing work other than the calendar, on issues ranging from legal aid to community media, radical education to prisoner solidarity. We work from an anti-imperialist, anti-racist, anti- capitalist, feminist, queer- and trans-liberationist position. All proceeds from the calendar go to abolitionist organizations working for a better world.