Call for Pitches: Publishing & Preserving Marginalized Languages

Hazine is seeking 4-5 pieces focused on publishing or bookstores specializing in marginalized or unofficial languages. We’re open to different geographical areas, but focused on places where Arabic, Persian, and Turkish are the lingua franca. 

We’re interested in pieces and projects that cover language preservation, book design and typography, publishing as infrastructure for knowledge production and education, and bookstores fulfilling these roles and providing community support. Formats could include essays, resource lists, and interviews with projects or companies you’d like to profile; and topics can be current or historical.

Pieces might address the following questions: 

  • What obstacles do these endeavors face (technological, cultural, legal, or political)?
  • How are such companies or projects responsive to community needs?
  • How do these publishing houses or bookstores shape readership?
  • How do they complicate regional book production or histories of the book?

Pitches should be no longer than 300 words and should be accompanied by a few sentences telling us who you are. Pitches (and pieces) are accepted in English. We are open to different forms of style as we expand the essay category of the site but do have a look at the essays we’ve run previously, like this one on typography and this one on archivy, because they demonstrate what we’re really looking for: a strong point of view. Our resource guides are also flexible: some take a narrative form and others take more of a list-form. Completed pieces –if accepted– will be 2000 words or less. Deadlines for completed pieces are flexible. Each piece is paid at least 100 USD upon publication.

Send pitches to hazineblog[at]gmail.com by May 25th 2022. All pitches will receive a response after the deadline.