New Orleans Music Issue: Call for Submissions
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A city, a story; a fantasy, a reality. From jazz to bounce, from Cajun fiddle to sludge metal. With over three hundred years of musical history, it’s bound to get complicated.
The Oxford American is dedicating our 28th annual Music Issue to exploring and celebrating the music of New Orleans, Louisiana. Inimitable and enigmatic, the city has nurtured some of the most foundational artists in American music: jazz piano pioneers like Jelly Roll Morton and Sweet Emma Barrett; accordionist Amédé Ardoin, the Black Creole father of Zydeco; Mahalia Jackson and her irrepressible voice.
We’re interested in stories that engage New Orleans’s past while keeping their finger on the pulse of its present. What might make New Orleans a contender for the Black music capital of America? Is the idea of such a place antiquated? How was Houston music affected by people moving there from New Orleans after Katrina? How do the genres and grooves that New Orleans has exported to the rest of the world, from Juvenile to Sissy Nobby to EyeHateGod, still live within the city? What venues are too local for the tourists, and why?
We want to push past the conventional narratives of New Orleans music to find hidden truths. We want to know what’s happening today on its many venerable stages; we want to glimpse what it has in store for the future. How are musicmakers in New Orleans, like Leyla McCalla, Flagboy Giz, or Twisted Teens, mining their city’s long past? Where do ghosts, figurative or literal, show up in New Orleans’s sounds?
Recent headlines have reported that New Orleans must be abandoned to the rising seas, but we don’t believe that’s true. We want to hear perspectives on life and music in the city in the midst of climate change, learn what New Orleanians really need, and share stories of the work they’re doing to meet the challenge of a changing world.
We’re seeking reported features, personal essays, short stories, short dispatches and meditations, poems, music criticism, and liner notes for tracks on the vinyl LP that will accompany the issue. For fiction, poetry, and personal essays, full drafts may be submitted; for reported nonfiction work, please send us a pitch.
We will be accepting submissions for this project through Submittable only. Submissions will remain open until Friday, July 31st, or until we reach 300 submissions. Multiple submissions are not allowed; if submitting multiple works, please include them in a single submission. The Oxford American does not accept or review submissions created with the use of generative AI.
We’ll be accepting submissions on a rolling basis, and deadlines will fall through the late summer and early fall. The issue will be on newsstands in late November. Compensation will depend on the length and complexity of the story; all writers will be paid.
We look forward to hearing from you!