Call for Submissions 

Penumbra Special Teaching Edition 2026 

Theme:  Teaching Lives 

Teaching is more than a career. It is a way of inhabiting the world—a practice of curiosity, uncertainty, human connection, obsessive self-reflection, and continual becoming. It unfolds in classrooms and labs, studios and stages, libraries and field sites, offices, coffee shops, and hallways, and in the moments that shape both teacher and student, even after a course has ended.   For this special edition, Penumbra, the journal of literature and art at Stanislaus State University, invites academics and educators across the globe, especially those hailing from the Central Valley, to reflect creatively on the theme Teaching Lives. We seek work that explores the textures of teaching: the moments of discovery and doubt, connection and transformation, humor and pain, inspiration, lamentation, failure, and reengagement; the rocky pursuit of knowledge and awareness and the creative products that emerge therefrom. We welcome pieces that consider the craft of teaching, the communities we build, the lives we encounter, and the ways our work continually recalibrates our asymptotic understanding of ourselves and the world. The theme is meant to be expansive, encompassing classrooms both literal and metaphorical, the visible and invisible labor of teaching, mentorship, scholarship, creativity, service, memory, or imagination, so long as it speaks meaningfully to the experience of teaching and learning.  Contributors may submit one of the following: 

• Up to three poems 
• One short story 
• One creative nonfiction piece 
• One hybrid work
• One one-act play 
• Up to three works of visual art 
• Up to three photographs 

As always, Penumbra is edited and produced by Stanislaus State students, who are honored to read, curate, and present the creative work of the faculty who inspire the local university community. However, we seek submissions from teachers near or far, college professors,teaching assistants, lecturers, adjunct faculty, secondary school teachers, and so on. If you teach and love to create, then we want to hear from you. We look forward to sharing this conversation with our campus and beyond. Please adhere to the following guidelines: 

• Each work must be submitted separately as an individual piece (i.e. upload one piece per submission). Those who include multiple pieces in one submission (by uploading 3 poems in one document, for example) will not be considered for inclusion in Penumbra. 
• Poetry: avoid the urge to submit “epic” or narrative poems of several hundred lines. Because of space restrictions in our print journal, we need to keep poems relatively short—between haiku length and 150 lines.  
• Hybrid/Fiction/Non-Fiction: We will not consider individual works in these genres that exceed 1500 words in length. 
• Art: Images must be submitted in jpeg format, with a minimum resolution of 200 dpi.  
• All works must be submitted through Submittable. Again, each work must be    uploaded individually. 
• The deadline for submissions is October 28th, 2026 before midnight. 

  For more information, refer to Penumbra’s submissions guidelines. 

Call for Submissions: Home 

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free . . . Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.”     —Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus” (1883) 

What does it mean to call a place home? 

For some, home is a place left behind. For others, it is a place their parents or grandparents remember—a country, neighborhood, language, kitchen, landscape, or way of life known through stories and traditions. Home can be inherited or chosen, found or lost, remembered or imagined. It can be a source of belonging and comfort, but also of conflict, exclusion, displacement, and longing. 

The United States has been shaped by people whose relationships to this land are profoundly different: Indigenous peoples whose histories precede the nation itself; people brought here by force; immigrants and refugees crossing borders and oceans; families displaced by war, poverty, racism, or economic necessity; and generations born here who nevertheless negotiate questions of culture, language, identity, and belonging. 

Here in California’s Central Valley, these histories meet in especially vivid ways. Our communities have been shaped by migration and labor, by family and faith, by languages and traditions carried across generations, and by people continually making and remaking a sense of home. 

For this special edition of Penumbra, we invite students in the Ethnic Studies program to submit poetry and short fiction exploring the theme of “Home.” 

We invite you to interpret that word expansively. Where—or what—is home? Is it a country? A town? A neighborhood, a family, a language, a body, a memory? Can you have more than one home? Can you belong somewhere and still feel like an outsider? What is preserved when people move, and what is lost? What do we inherit from those who came before us? What happens when others decide who belongs and who does not? And what does it mean to make a home in a place that has not always made room for you? 

Your work may explore immigration, indigeneity, diaspora, race, ethnicity, migration, assimilation, cultural memory, family, language, displacement, mixed or hyphenated identities—or something altogether unexpected. 

Through your creative writing, express what home means to you. Tell us where it is. Tell us what it remembers. Tell us what it costs. Tell us how we find it, lose it, leave it, and make it again. 

Submissions are limited to California State Univeristy Stanislaus Ethnic Studies students.