Call for Art & Essay Submissions for 2024 Certain Days: Freedom for Political Prisoner Calendar
The Certain Days: Freedom for Political Prisoners Calendar collective is releasing its 23rd calendar in 2024. With twelve pieces of beautiful art and twelve essays, these radical calendars have a history of hanging in thousands of homes, workplaces, prison cells, and community spaces around the globe—both educating and reminding us of those behind bars in the struggle for a better world.
Having your work featured in the Certain Days calendar is a prestigious honor and a unique opportunity to use your words and your creative abilities to create a vision of an abolitionist future free of prisons, power structures, and authority. We especially seek to raise the voices of people who are or were incarcerated, so please forward this call for submissions to any prison-based artists and writers in your circles.
With the proceeds from these beautiful, educational calendars you are able to directly support organizations working to aid political prisoners and abolish the prison industrial complex.
Beneficiaries from the 2022 calendar include Release Aging People in Prison – RAPP, Mutulu Shakur legal support, The Sundiata Acoli Freedom Campaign release fund, Puget Sound Prisoner Support, Coalition to Decarcerate IL, Appalachians Against Pipelines, Community Resource Initiative, Burning Books expansion, P4W Memorial Collective, Cascadia Forest Defenders, and the Atlanta Solidarity Fund.
Submit your abolition-themed art or writing now and help raise funds for those struggling on the front lines of social change. See guidelines below for further information.
Submission Deadline: May Day – Sunday, May 1, 2023
Guidelines
Articles
• 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.
Art
• The calendar is 11” tall by 8.5” wide, so art with a ‘portrait’ orientation is preferred. Art does not need to fit those dimensions exactly.
• We are interested in a diversity of media.
• The calendar is printed in color and we prefer color images.
• 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).
• You may send as many submissions as you like. Chosen artists and authors will receive a complimentary copy of the calendar. Because the calendar is a fundraiser, we cannot offer money to contributors.
Due to space limitations, submissions may be lightly edited for clarity and concision, with no change to the original intent. This call for submissions is available as a PDF here.
Send submissions by May Day, May 1, 2023, to info@certaindays.org or mail to: Certain Days, c/o Burning Books, 420 Connecticut Street, Buffalo, NY 14213.
Certain Days 2023: Order Now!
We are happy to announce that sales for the 2023 Certain Days: Freedom for Political Prisoners Calendar (our 22nd edition) have begun!
In the U.S., order from Burning Books.
You can also buy them from AK Press.
In Canada, order 1-9 copies from Left Wing Books.
Certain Days 2023
The Certain Days: Freedom for Political Prisoners Calendar is a joint fundraising and educational project between outside organizers across North America and political prisoner 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 founding member David Gilbert home from prison in 2021. We work from an anti-imperialist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, feminist, queer- and trans-liberationist position.
This year features art and writings by Zola, Jeff Monaghan and Andy Crosby, Kill joy, Noelle Hanrahan, Juan Hernandez, Dan Baker, Antiproduct, Upping the Anti, Katy Slininger, David Gilbert, Paul Lacombe, Garrett Felber, Oso Blanco, Mark Tilsen, Terra Poirier, Steve McCain, Lawrence Jenkins, Ed Mead, Windigo Army, Dio Cramer, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Scott Parkin, Seize the Mean and Cindy Barukh Milstein.
Proceeds from the Certain Days 2022 calendar were divided amongst Release Aging People in Prison (RAPP), Mutulu Shakur legal support, Sundiata Acoli release fund, Burning Books expansion, Puget Sound Prisoner Support, Coalition to Decarcerate Illinois, Appalachians Against pipelines, Community Resource Initiative- CA, P4W Memorial Collective Prisoners’ Justice Day healing circle, Wet’suwet’en Solidarity Fund 2022, Cascadia Forest Defenders and NorCal Resist. Proceeds from the 2023 calendar will go to some of the same grassroots groups and more.
Running Down the Walls 2022
On September 10th and 11th, the Chicago-based Midwest Books to Prisoners and Philly ABC held runs in their respective cities. Check out the photos and recaps of these two events at: twitter.com/MidwestBooks2P twitter.com/phillyabc
How to Write U.S. Political Prisoners
An awesome short video by Burning Books and Page One collective about the history of the Anarchist Black Cross and how to write political prisoners.
