4. Seven Sleepers Press

Seven Sleepers Press, directed by Noor Asif and Joel Auerbach, publishes work that explores possibilities of collective transformation beyond the secular frame. Seven Sleepers is 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 are looking for work that engages with paradigms of the sacred, ritual, myth, theology, and variant modes of consciousness on their own terms, and invite writers for whom these worldviews possess the power to generate new relations between the psychic and the social, the sacred and the profane, the finite and the infinite, the local and the global. Seven Sleepers is necessarily interdisciplinary; we are interested in critical and scholarly work from any discipline as well as creative nonfiction, fiction, or hybrid work.

Our reading period is open from September 15th to December 15th. We are looking for book-length manuscripts, ideally up to 250 pages, but are also open to shorter essays. Please email us your work as a Word document. If you have ideas for works still in progress or pieces that don’t conform to standard formats, we are happy to discuss further.

For questions or queries, or to send material, please reach us at 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.