Our regular contributor Rui Carvalho invites readers and contributors to submit poetry to the next annual Nature Writing Contest.
Our contest, Nature 2025-2026, is a new opportunity that we, as organizers, create to reach the rest of the world. Every Contest is a challenge for authors participating and to people that make it happen. This year we invite all authors to write poetry about:
(i) Flowers;
(ii) Trees and wind;
(iii) Water;
(iv) Nature Conservation;
(v) Turtles;
(vi) Love for people and nature;
(vii) Hope and Happiness.
Rules and submission information here.
Synchronized Chaos’ new issue, Questing for Renewal, explores how people navigate a world marked by impermanence, injustice, loss, and change while continuing to seek meaning, compassion, and growth. Across poetry, fiction, essays, and criticism, the contributors examine life, always asking how individuals can respond with courage, creativity, and hope.
Christopher Bernard’s fourth installment of Otherwise argues that even in times when evil appears triumphant, humanity must continue imagining and building a better future. David and Emile Sapp offer complementary poetic and prose reflections on a natural scene with egrets and herons, while Elmaya Jabbarova envisions a fairer society grounded in ethics and spirituality. Sumana Bhattacharjee calls on individuals to improve the world through personal action, and Nidia Garcia presents a peaceful meadow that reminds readers of nature’s restorative power.
Family, love, and remembrance emerge as recurring themes. Priyanka Neogi and Maftuna Rustamova celebrate fathers through tributes to their wisdom, care, and everyday acts of devotion. Mirta Liliana Ramirez honors relationships which have ended yet still enrich her memories, while Graciela Noemi Villaverde reflects on a love that brings serenity and emotional balance. Jasmila Talić-Kujundžić speaks to the inner life of a mother: identity, spirituality, and love. Mesfakus Salahin contributes a piece of understated tenderness. Tursunqulova Sabina Muzrob qizi’s short adventure story celebrates friendship, respect, and community in a small village. Danijela Ćuk portrays steadfast loyalty amid life’s uncertainties, and Eva Lianou Petropoulou contributes both a call for peace and mutual respect and a celebration of enduring romantic tenderness.
Many contributors confront mortality and the passage of time. Mahbub Alam reflects on life’s transience and the need for gentleness; Kumushbibi Hamidova surveys contemporary longevity research; Alan Hardy meditates on aging, creativity, humility, and nature; Nurbek Norchayev examines impermanence and human experience; and Nad Raf offers visceral poems on grief, aging, and mortality. Royal Rhodes’ three poems deepen these concerns through explorations of vision, madness, embodiment, spiritual longing, and the tension between earthly existence and transcendence.
Several works address social realities and cultural history. Kahlil Crawford depicts cultural and ecological regeneration amid disruption while Shlok Pandey reveals the suffering war inflicts on ordinary lives. Alan Catlin’s work explores the ways writers, photographers, and other artists have borne witness to war, loss, and suffering and refused to abandon even the lives they could not save to oblivion. Joseph C. Ogbonna’s work is a politically charged, spiritually framed lament that draws on William Blake’s “Jerusalem” to reinterpret Nigeria’s national crisis through religious longing and moral urgency. Stephen Jarrell Williams’ work contains a spiritual element as well, urging readers to help make the present-day world more humane and just while holding to an eternal hope through faith. Bill Tope’s story recalls the discrimination faced by LGBTQ communities and Jacques Fleury’s darkly comic narrative uncovers the lingering struggles of abuse survivors. Hassan Musa Dakasku advocates fearless self-expression, Alex S. Johnson profiles artist and activist Nina Hartley, who advocated body autonomy, Patricia Doyne satirizes federal monuments mismanagement, and Dr. Jernail Anand Singh reflects on how societies create heroes and what heroism means today. Dr. Kathleen Bryson’s poetry recollects the U.S. 1969 moon landing and how it captured people’s imagination even as reality descended. Thi Lan Anh Tran and Musharraf Hussain examine the US-Iran conflict through the metaphor of a troubled relationship as Sardor Raximov outlines potential solutions to modern-day challenges to effective United Nations global leadership.
The collection also highlights cultural inquiry and intellectual growth. Shermamatova Charos celebrates a young lifetime spent reading a variety of material. Abdukarimova Qadriya Istat qizi documents the Timurid renaissance, Safarova Sabrina Fazliddin qizi poetically honors and celebrates her Uzbek heritage, and Feruza A’zamova investigates metamorphosis as a theme in contemporary Central Asian literature. Fhen M. contributes both a critique of reductive approaches to Philippine literary criticism and a metaphorical reflection on institutional decay through the image of a rotting ship. Next, Rukshona Abdulatipova discusses the educational and professional value of English-language learning, and Erkin Shaymardanov advocates cycling and physical activity as social goods. A survey of the works of Eldar Akhadov, Ashraf Abu al-Yazid, Shirani Rajapakse, Eden Soriano Trinidad, Adel Khozam, Ayo Ayoola-Amale, Luis Carlos Prestes Jr., Nia Amira Osman, and Margarita Al opens a window onto contemporary international literature as Richard C. Bower, Mansfield, UK’s poet laureate, expresses the value of poetry to help people slow down and think, in his interview with poet Eva Petropoulou Lianou.
Spiritual, ecological, and existential questions weave throughout the issue. Lan Xin calls for a global awakening from ignorance into higher consciousness. Shermamatova Dilnura Shavkat qizi describes personal reflections on what kind of person she wishes to become. Duane Vorhees combines myth, humor, tenderness, and everyday experience to show how people sustain one another through life. Mykyta Ryzhykh’s surreal and unsettling work explores homelessness, trauma, alienation, and fractured identity. J.J. Campbell’s poetry evokes disappointment, bodily exhaustion, failed idealism, and the slow erosion of meaning in everyday life, as Patrick Sweeney sketches out everyday life tipping into absurdity. Taryn Allan speaks to existential crisis, melancholy, and the human condition. Zunaira Rehman captures the ordinary heartbreak of life’s many farewells, while Elaine Murray finds resilience in rivers, mist, and starlight even as she mourns environmental degradation. Charos Ismoilova urges the ecological restoration of the Aral Sea as Ananya S. Guha suggests that continuing to love a natural place that has been degraded over time is itself an act of hopeful rebellion. Christina Chin celebrates peaceful moments with birds as Su Yun’s middle grade students revel in the mysteries and beauty of their environment. Brian Barbeito offers up a nostalgic and introspective reflection on his childhood and adolescence as Mark Young collaborates with nature on a fresh and vibrant set of his altered geographies. Sayani Mukherjee journeys through memory, history, and consciousness toward an affirmation of identity and selfhood. Finally, in his new collection tombboy, reviewed by Cristina Deptula, poet Mykyta Ryzhykh reaches out in an alienating, violent world for a fragile affirmation of love.
Together, these works form a rich tapestry of voices united by a common conviction: that despite loss, conflict, mortality, and uncertainty, human beings continue to seek understanding, preserve memory, nurture connection, and imagine renewal.