November 2025 Challenge
Place
Home should mean safety—but for millions, it’s temporary, contested, or already gone. Write about displacement, intrusion, surveillance, and the fight to stay. Whether it’s ICE raids, refugee crises, or the universal ache of being uprooted, show us what happens when the threat comes from inside the house. What does it mean to feel unsafe in your own home? How do you rebuild after being taken?
We want writing that explores what the shape of shelter means today: home insecurity, surveillance states and border walls, systems that decide who gets to stay and who gets sent away, the feeling of identity under scrutiny, the sound of a knock at the door. Write about resistance and resilience. Write about how we hold onto home, even when home can’t (or won’t) hold onto us.
We welcome writing of all forms: fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and hybrid work. If it’s alive, urgent, and something you have to write right now, send it our way.
Three winners will be selected and published at the end of December.
November 1, 2025
up to 1,000 words of prose / 2 pages of poetry
$10