2025 CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS IS LIVE
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2025 CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS IS LIVE 〰️
ENCYCLOPEDIA PRISMATICA
A New Form of Engaged Literature
Mission statement
To engage is not merely to observe, but to reckon. Not to skim the surface of the world, but to descend into it. Encyclopedia Prismatica is a journal for those who do not mistake commentary for commitment, nor novelty for meaning.
We believe literature, art, and criticism are not passive reflections of society—they are active confrontations with it. Encyclopedia Prismatica publishes work that calls us into presence. This is engagement not as a genre, but as a mode of being, a form of attentiveness, a stance toward the world.
To be engaged is to question the commonplace; to resist aesthetic detachment; to seek meaning not just in what is said, but in how and why it is said. To treat language as excavation—each piece a shard, a relic, a gesture toward something more human, more urgent, more creative.
We are not here to entertain—we are here to disrupt forgetting. Encyclopedia Prismatica invites essays, poetry, fiction, and visual art that trouble the ordinary, complicate certainty, and awaken readers from the sleep of habitual thought. We seek the politically aware and the philosophically precise, but also the strange, the tender, the raw. We do not ask that you take a side. We ask that you take part. Read like an archaeologist, not a tourist.
This is Encyclopedia Prismatica.
"It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it."
– Anais Nin.
What IS Engaged Literature?
“[The writer’s] goal is to compose literature of praxis which is openly engaged with contemporary society and history in order to be Committed and inspire social change. The purpose of the author [is] to make history, using words as instruments of action.” — J-P Sartre
Committed literature is an art that is meant to reach the masses, not fellow intellectuals through “scholarly detachment”. Encyclopedia Prismatica continues the legacy of 20th century journals like Les Temps Modernes, while expanding the scope and possibility of engagement.
Why Engaged Literature now?
We are in an era of unprecedented detachment, one where we no longer live, but watch life lived for us—through news, social media, and hearsay. We have become tourists to our world, watching the scenes go by and letting them tell us how to feel, replacing originality with postcard clichés that tell us what to think and how to act. Now, more than ever, we are in need of that very human emotion: curiosity. We are in need of engagement.