Opportunity
Not the time to be silent is a socially engaged arts response to social distancing formed in March 2020 by Irish artist Siobhan Potter. The initial phase of the project took the form of an international online community and weekly poetry event.
Responding to the constraints of the initial Covid-19 lockdown, the NTTTBS model has been used nationally and internationally to resource and empower the poetry community to respond, modelling autonomy and new community group formation.
Not the time to be silent is now working on phase 2, a literature project, funded by the Arts Council of Ireland and Limerick Culture and Arts Office. This poetry collection is written, edited and published by group members. We want to share this experiential response with a wider audience, of future time and place, through a book as a physical art object and an e-book to honour the virtual space that NTTTBS occupies.
About the collected works
This poetry collection has two purposes. Firstly, to document the response of Not the time to be silent activists, who provided an inclusive, international community, that, despite geographical distance, formed common ground online out of the need to not be silent, the need to continue to write and the need to gather and be heard so as to maintain personal & collective physical, emotional and spiritual health. In doing so, poets continued to do, what poets do; to write and to document history.
Second and no less important is the opportunity to pay contributors for their work. All of the poets who read at events did so without payment and the Arts Council and the Limerick Culture and Arts office support this opportunity to pay contributors for their work, as per Poetry Ireland and Visual Artists Ireland guidelines. The physicality of the book as an art object is as important as the content. A limited-edition piece, it is available to contributors, funders and libraries nationally and internationally.
Curator: Siobhan Potter (IRL)
Editors: Ciaran O’Driscoll (IRL), Tayve Neese (USA)
Cover art submissions
Cover Art Fee: €490
Closing date: 23 January 2022 at 5pm Irish time
Guidelines for cover art submissions:
https://greensubmissions.com/159755/not-the-time-to-be-silent/index.php
Please watch the submissions video and read the guidelines prior to submitting: https://vimeo.com/654519301
Queries: thisisnotthetimetobesilent@gmail.com
