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.