Call for Submissions: I AM HERE TO FIGHT! An Anthology on the Struggle for Public Education.

I Am Here to Fight!

An anthology on the struggle for public education and education justice in Indianapolis. To be published by North Meridian Press.

“I am here to fight.” — Peyton Moll, 5th grade student, Theodore Potter School 74, testifying at an IPS board meeting.

At a recent Indianapolis Public Schools board meeting, Peyton Moll, a fifth grader, stood up and declared, “I am here to fight.” This collection takes its name and its moral direction from her. She spoke for thousands. She reminded us that the struggle for public education is not abstract. It is urgent, embodied, political, and ongoing.

This anthology will gather the voices of those fighting for educational justice and opportunity in Indianapolis and Central Indiana. Sometimes that fight is for the IPS system. Sometimes it’s against it. Often, it’s both at once.

We are calling for essays, stories, reflections, research-informed writings, speculative pieces, and multimedia submissions that speak to the struggle to define, defend, and reimagine public education in a city and state under siege by privatization, political opportunism, and manufactured public confusion.

This anthology will document the stories and strategies that define this moment and seed the visions for what comes next.

Let us name the fight. Let us imagine otherwise. Let us tell it like it is. Let’s write it down before it is rewritten for us.

Who Should Submit?

This call is open to parents, students, teachers, organizers, researchers, artists, public school graduates, neighbors, and anyone else in Central Indiana who has participated in historical and contemporary battles for educational justice.

You don’t need academic credentials. You need clarity, lived experience, and the will to tell the truth. Bring your insight. Bring your anger. Bring your imagination. Bring your voice.

What We’re Looking For:

This anthology will center the lived experiences, research, observations, frustrations, dreams, and tactics of those engaged in the fight for educational justice and liberation in Central Indiana. Submissions can respond directly or indirectly to any of the provocations outlined below and may include:

-      Personal essays or reflections

-      Critical or research-informed narratives (written for a general audience)

-      Creative nonfiction, poetry, speculative fiction, or imagined futures

-      Speculative or visionary works

-      Oral histories or multigenerational accounts

-      Letters, manifestos, monologues, or visual essays

-      Multimedia compositions (zines, short video, podcast/audio, digital collage)

We are NOT looking for jargon-filled academic journal articles, dry policy summaries, or generic op-eds. If your work is sharp, soulful, rigorous, or imaginative, we want to read it. We are looking for rigorous thinking, grounded insight, and creative expression. We welcome critical perspectives rooted in experience as much as formal expertise.

What’s at Stake?

Across Indiana, and especially in Indianapolis, billionaires and reactionaries have used public policy to dismantle public education in plain sight. Under the banner of “choice,” they’ve restructured school governance to benefit private operators and elite families, while draining resources from traditional public schools and redistributing them to already over-resourced communities.

Meanwhile, many within our own city government, local education boards, and philanthropic sector have embraced these changes, sidelining the communities they claim to serve. This collection asks:

How do we fight back—and what are we fighting for?

Guiding Questions & Themes

You’re invited to respond to any of the following prompts—or go in your own direction:

Struggles & Strategies

-      How do we fight for educational justice in a city where power often speaks in the language of equity but acts in the interests of privatization?

-      What should be torn down? What can be repaired? What must be built?

-      What strategies have yet to be tried? What lessons have we learned from past battles?

Power, Rhetoric & Resistance

-      How have corporate-funded advocacy groups co-opted grassroots aesthetics and language?

-      What ethical breaches exist when IPS leaders accept funding and influence from organizations working to dismantle IPS itself?

-      How do we expose, ridicule, and resist the branding and personal theatrics of reactionary public officials?

Mythologies & Public Imagination

-      What or who is the “public” in public education, and who gets to define it?

-      Has the charter narrative become a mythology? What keeps it alive despite the data?

-      What visions of schooling remain unexplored, and how do we begin to imagine otherwise?

Identity, History & Purpose

-      Who has the right to want something better for their child in a system that has failed so many?

-      What do fugitive, marooned, and ancestral traditions teach us about community-based education?

-      What is the purpose of schooling, and whose voices get to answer that question?

Additional provocations include:

-      How do we fight for public education—and what are we fighting for?

-      How can everyday people move from awareness to action, from policy spectators to participants? What stories of our own activation can be shared?

-      What myths about public schooling need to be challenged—or reexamined?

-      How have conservative efforts to suppress DEI, sex ed, and civic history reshaped the educational landscape, and what opportunities for resistance or liberation remain?

-      How have liberals and moderates enabled the erosion of equitable public education?

-      How do billionaires and their organizations weaponize grassroots aesthetics and co-opt advocacy?

-      What stories remain hidden—of harm, resilience, betrayal, or possibility?

-      What do children have to say, and who’s listening?

-      What tactics and strategies of marginalized and marooned communities need to be relearned and remembered? Which new ways of collaboration and resistance should be embraced?

Submission Details

-      Deadline: Friday, September 26, 2025

-      Length: Written submissions up to 4,000 words; multimedia reviewed case-by-case

-      Format: Word documents (.docx). For digital/audio/visual formats, include a short artist’s or author’s statement

-      Email submissions to: Mark Latta, m.nlatta@gmail.com; Wes Bishop, wrbishop@jsu.edu.

-      Subject Line: Submission – I Am Here to Fight

Please include:

-      A short bio (100 words max)

-      Whether the work is previously published (simultaneous submissions are accepted, but please do let us know)

We look forward to receiving your submission!