Anthology Submission Guidelines

As part of Operation Homecoming, the National Endowment for the Arts will support the printing of an anthology of wartime writing by active U.S. military personnel and their immediate families. The anthology will be sold in bookstores and will be distributed free by the Arts Endowment to military installations, schools, and libraries. The submission deadline has been extended to March 31, 2005.

The Arts Endowment has no preconceived ideas about the content of the anthology. There are no restrictions upon genre - poems, letters, personal narratives, stories, memoir, journal writing, and other literary forms are all welcome. Some works may address actual combat, others may focus on life on the homefront. Many works may be personal - a soldier's or a spouse's attempt to capture and clarify a singularly challenging moment in life. Some of it may rise to literature - vivid accounts of experience that arrest the reader's attention and linger in the memory. All of it will have historical value as the testimony of men and women who saw the events directly. Operation Homecoming will capture these individual accounts and preserve them for the public record. American letters will be richer for their addition.

The National Endowment for the Arts will not be able to publish all of the works sent due to space limitations, but the Arts Endowment will ensure that after the project is completed, the submissions are deposited at an appropriate government archive for the education of future generations of Americans.

WHO IS ELIGIBLE TO SUBMIT WRITING

Military personnel, reservists, National Guard members, and Coalition Authority members who served after September 11, 2001, especially in Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom, as well as their immediate families, are eligible to submit writing for consideration in the published anthology.

SUBMISSION STYLE

Submissions should be no longer than 50 typescript, double-spaced, numbered pages. Materials must be legible and clearly reproduced. Please use font sizes no smaller than 11 and no larger than 14 points. Please use paper that measures 8-1/2 by 11 inches.

Please include a cover sheet with each submission that contains a legal name, address, phone number, and email address if applicable. Because of troop rotation and deployments, it is particularly important to have a current email address or permanent address to respond to regarding submissions.

Copies of submissions cannot be returned. Please keep a copy for yourself.

SUBMISSION ADDRESS

Submissions can be emailed to:
submissions@operationhomecoming.org

Or mailed to:
National Endowment for the Arts
Operation Homecoming Anthology
Suite 519
1100 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20506

National Endowment for the Arts
Contact the Web Manager.