Image by Sarah-Jane Crowson
Dear writers, readers and friends,
Ramadan Mubarak to all those our writers observing this month. May you find calm, set new creative goals and emerge with a fresh creative energy.
For April, we are very excited to present a special month-long collaboration with artist, writer and visual poet, Sarah-Jane Crowson (https://sarah-janecrowson.com/about-sarah-jane-crowson/) . Sarah-Jane was shortlisted for our writing prize in 2021 and we have been keenly watching her work evolve ever since. She creates exquisite collages that combine layers of images with found words.
Not only is Sarah-Jane responsible for your wonderful visual prompt this month, but she is also taking over our Instagram account and will be posting a prompt-a-day throughout April. Each and every day you will be greeted by one of Sarah’s beautiful works via Instagram. Use these prompts to ignite your morning pages, generate new work or to simply spark ideas. You are welcome to share your work in the comments on Instagram or just enjoy the prompts for yourself.
To inspire your words, we are thrilled to feature Lorelei Bacht on page 1. Lorelei is a much-loved contributor to Visual Verse and her recent work has appeared and/or is forthcoming in Mercurius, Anti-Heroin Chic, Menacing Hedge, Beir Bua, Sinking City, Barrelhouse, SWWIM, The Inflectionist Review, After the Pause, and elsewhere. Find her on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/lorelei.bacht.writer/) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/bachtlorelei) .
On page 2 we welcome Erica Viola, a newcomer to Visual Verse. Erica is a London-based writer of fiction, creative non-fiction and poetry and is originally from Omaha. She was shortlisted for Creative Futures award in 2020. You can find more of her work at linktr.ee/ericaviola.
So we invite you to write, as usual, a 50-500 word response to this image and we also invite you to head over the Instagram and enjoy a new prompt each day from Sarah-Jane. Be sure to submit your work to visualverse.org/submit by 15th April.
The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.
Kristen
with Preti, Isabel, Lucie, Ashish, Zaynab and Wes
Find the VV crew on socials:
Visual Verse (https://twitter.com/pretitaneja/)
Kristen Harrison (https://www.instagram.com/kittyharrison/)
Preti Taneja (https://twitter.com/PretiTaneja)
Lucie Stevens (https://twitter.com/LucieStevens_)
Ashish Kumar (https://twitter.com/Ashish_stJude) Singh (https://twitter.com/Ashish_stJude)
Zaynab Bobi (https://twitter.com/ZainabBobi)
Wes White (https://twitter.com/archaeologyBoy)