5. Seven Sleepers Press

Seven Sleepers press, directed by Noor Asif and Joel Auerbach, publishes work that explores possibilities of liberation and collectivity beyond the secular frame. We are invested in projects that lend voice to a vast repertoire of forms of life and struggle that have often been neglected or disavowed by approaches confined to the limits of secular rationality. We seek work that engages with paradigms of the sacred, ritual, myth, theology, and variant modes of consciousness on their own terms. We invite writers for whom these worldviews still possess the power to inspire transformation on the plane of history. Seven Sleepers is necessarily interdisciplinary and involves making new connections across the psychic and the social, the sacred and the profane, the finite and the infinite, the local and the global. We are interested in critical and scholarly work from any discipline as well as creative nonfiction, fiction, or hybrid work. For questions or queries, please contact noor.asif@berkeley.edu or joel.auerbach@berkeley.edu.

Noor Asif is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at UC Berkeley and an associate editor for Parapraxis. She works on the psychosocial dynamics of religious experience, sectarian violence, anticolonial resistance, and nationalism in South Asian literature, art, and film. Her writing has appeared in Parapraxis, The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, and The Juggernaut.

Joel Auerbach is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric and Critical Theory at UC Berkeley and an editor for Qui Parle. He works on philosophy, American literature, religion, and the political theology of race in the 19th and early 20th centuries. His writing has appeared in Qui Parle and South Atlantic Quarterly.