The Head & The Hand’s mission is to publish writing that has the power to spark change and entertain, and the socially conscious Shockwire Chapbook Series is our gambit to raise the storytelling stakes. 

Shockwire stories are snapshots of a time and place where expressions of curiosity, empathy, and acceptance shine a light on their absence in everyday life.

We may not be lawmakers or world leaders, but we are storytellers with the power to contribute to a national conversation.

We amplify our contribution by writing toward a deeper understanding of ourselves and one another and sharing that vision in the form of a chapbook.

Through our spring and fall 2018 Shockwire series, we published stories of homelessness, immigration, intersectionality, and civil rights history.

Our 2019/2020 Shockwire series will be releasing in August 2020:

Bedside Manner by Gemma Cooper-Novack

Edie Jarvis is a college campus enigma, known to all but truly seen by only a select few. Callie considers herself lucky to be one of the chosen in Edie’s wide orbit, and when their relationship is tested, she begins to understand just how far her insight into another person can extend. 

Gemini--Duality of Self by Osimiri Sprowal

Gemini is gorgeous group of poems chronicling this young Philadelphia writer’s experience as a transmasculine bigendered person. The collection deals with queer familial strife, the intersection of blackness and transness, and the intricacies of being a multi-gendered person healing from internalized transphobia and binary-existentialism. 

Growth Response by Dena Igusti

This extraordinary series of poems discusses the aftermath of undergoing female genital mutilation in Indonesia, and how the act influences lineage, trauma, body dysmorphia, and diaspora. Dena Igusti, the Indonesian-Muslim poet who authored this collection, is the co-founder of Short Line!, an organization dedicated to connecting artists to their communities, to each other, to resources, and to themselves.

Terrarium by Joe Baumann

Where does fantasy end and authentic connection begin? Nyle took the acting job at Hottie House under false pretenses, but his lie may open the door for another member’s deepest truth. When a plague of locusts descends, an event so bizarre that even porn experiences a “mini-slump” in site traffic, the actors trapped on location have no choice but to acknowledge that their audience has been reduced to one another. 

US VS by Jeffrey S. Markovitz

When we decide to become parents—regardless of the time and space in which the decision is made—we also decide to enter into a social contract that makes it impossible to impose a dividing line between our values and the values imparted by others to their children. What happens when those values collide? A day trip to the zoo is the backdrop of one such collision, ordinary in its frequency and extraordinary in its individual impact.