Deadline: 7 February 2011
This is a call for submissions for the 2011 edition of Best Music Writing, an anthology of English-language writing about music published by Da Capo Press each October. This year's guest editor is the esteemed critic and author Alex Ross.
We seek music writing in the form of brilliant features, essays, profiles, news articles, interviews, creative non-fiction, fiction, book reviews, long-format reviews, blog posts, and journal articles on musical and music culture-related topics. We also actively seek work that doesn't fit into these categories-more whimsical and/or emergent forms of music writing, such as tweets, blogs, Tumblr posts, and joint writing efforts.
We use the term "music" broadly to include all genres, time periods, and performers and "writing" to mean all work published in periodical form (print or online) in the calendar year 2010 (including "winter 2010/2011" journals). We regret that we cannot consider books, book chapters, liner notes, or transcripts of broadcast journalism.
One note: we urge writers and editors from English-publishing nations in the Caribbean, Africa, Oceania, and Asia as well as English-language writers and editors from Central America, South America, and Europe to submit work for consideration for the book. We are based in the US, but actively interested in including work from around and about the music of the globe.
Please send your own best work, work you've edited or overseen, great work of your friends and colleagues, or work that you have admired in passing throughout the year.
We prefer (in descending order):
-email links
-Word docs
-PDFs
-hard copies of articles
-whole publications (please paper clip or post-it the pages to read)
-an email of the the author name/article title/publication title/date
If you are an editor, please limit the number of submissions to your publication's best, most favored, most original and important works, as we do get quite a large number of submissions and only reprint 30-40 pieces per year (and, historical, never more than three from any one publication). Please email this note to your writers too, so they can nominate their own works.
Feel free to forward or repost this email, and to send mail multiple times as you find more pieces that you find notable. Please send items between now and February 7, 2011. Please feel free to forward this and repost it. Make sure the contact information is contained:
BMW2011 email: music writing at gmail dot com
BMW2011 mail: C/O BMW2011, 603 West 115th Street #120, New York, NY 10025
We will acknowledge all emails and packages, please allow two weeks from posting for follow up. Once the selections have been made for the anthology, all the publication's writers will be contacted to ask for reprint permission. Only selectees will be notified. Please check the "Other Notables" section of each year's book to see if your work was selected for this honorable mention. Please do continue to send work-each year it is a monumental task to read, compile, and curate the book, and it is impossible to reprint all the great work that we read each year.
Short version: We want to read your best music writing from 2010.
Please send it now: musicwriting at gmail com