Return to Roots: Writing Toward Land—A special teaching issue on Palestine and the Global Indigenous Struggle (January 2026)
Introduction by Guest Editor Sara Abou Rashed
With over seventy-seven years of contestation, Palestine has turned global like never before—a cause of radical empathy, of impossible belonging and of forced disconnection from ancestral land and reckoning against an occupying power. For Palestinians, as well as any Indigenous peoples forcibly (re)moved, land is not merely territory—it is the vessel of generational memory, holistic connectedness in which the people and their earth are one and in the same, and collective, deeply rich and rooted identity. It is this immense and unmeasurable loss of stolen land that keeps generations grounded in their pursuit of justice, in their reclamation of a mystical inheritance.
This issue welcomes submissions exploring returns, roots, and land largely writ—be it physical, imagined, occupied, liberated or in any possible condition which art and literature may make possible. This is a teaching issue across genres and languages committed to creating conversations around the curated works to enliven their mediums, extend their afterlife as well as generate fruitful conversation toward solidarity.
Submissions open: June 1 – July 31, 2025. We welcome submissions from Arab and Indigenous writers, artists, and educators in solidarity with Palestine in the following genres:
Poetry
Fiction
Creative Nonfiction
Visual Art
Translation
Craft & Teaching Materials on Palestine and Indigenous Resistance
As a special teaching issue, please note that we’re encouraging writers to submit accompanying educational materials with their creative submissions. This could include a list of questions, a brief craft reflection, a prompt or template. (Contributors from all backgrounds are welcome to submit to our Translations and Craft & Teaching Materials genres.) Please contact us with questions: editors@thedodgemag.com
Sara Abou Rashed is a Palestinian poet, speaker, and creator of the one-woman show, A Map of Myself. Her writing interrogates exile, memory, war and belonging broadly defined. Sara’s writing appears in The Kenyon Review, The LA Review of Books, Poetry Magazine, Poetry Wales, as well as the anthologies A Land with a People, Call the Night for a Dream: Palestinian Writing from the Diaspora and 9-12 ELA curriculum from McGraw Hill, among others. A former poetry fellow at the Vermont Studio Center, Sara's work has been commended by the UK Forward Prize and was awarded the 2023 Hopwood Award for Poetry from the University of Michigan, where she earned her MFA in Creative Writing. A Denison alum, Sara lives in Columbus, Ohio, and is working on her first book or two while occasionally speaking across the country.
The Dodge calls attention to Palestine as an environmental issue—an occupation of air, water, and land; a forced removal and genocide of its Indigenous population; an irreversible damage to its natural landscape and resources; a violent erasure of its ancestral villages; a persistent violation, exploitation and continued harm to its wellbeing and ecology at large.