Accent x Nowness

Accent x Nowness - Asian Women Crime Fiction Open Call

In real life, women often appear in crime reports as victims—the passive recipients of violence. This may help explain why women make up the majority of crime fiction readers: through reading, they look over the detective’s shoulder, participating vicariously in the investigation, the pursuit of the perpetrator, and the delivery of justice. As they witness the world move from chaos to order, we regain a sense of certainty and draw a measure of comfort from it.

And yet, crime fiction, particularly that from East Asia, is often a hotbed of misogyny. Women in these stories are victims, seductive accessories, or perfect saints. Even when they appear as femme fatales, they tend to revolve around men, suspended outside female friendships or emotional bonds—lonely, ornamental figures designed to be watched rather than understood.

We are searching for a new kind of crime fiction for Asian women. As the name suggests, these are crime stories with Asian women at the center. They may be the detectives, or the criminals. Regardless of their roles in the narrative, they don’t need to be perfect; they only need to be real. As novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen has said, “We can be both humane and inhumane. It’s important to acknowledge that”—those at the center of the narrative do not worry about being heroes or antiheroes.

At the same time, we recognize that more and more Asian women are moving across borders, navigating different cultures, languages, and countries. This sense of drift can render one vulnerable, but it also presents new challenges and opportunities for growth—realities rarely explored in crime writing in either English or Chinese.

With this bilingual open call, we hope to discover fresh, compelling, stereotype-defying crime fiction featuring Asian women—stories that reimagine the distance and connection between women and evil in our time.

Submission Guidelines:

who can submit:

Open to bilingual (Chinese/English) writers worldwide, regardless of age, gender, or background.
We welcome both established writers and fresh new voices.

Submission Guidelines:

- Fiction only, written in either Chinese or English.

- Chinese submissions must not exceed 10,000 characters; English submissions must not exceed 7,000 words.

- Email your complete manuscript as a Word document to accentsociety@gmail.com. Use the subject line: “Asian Women Crime Fiction_Title of Work.” Include a brief author bio (within 100 words) and your preferred contact information in the email body.

- Electronic submissions only. Manuscripts are considered final upon submission. Revisions will not be accepted after submission.

- Submissions must be original and unpublished, and must not be under copyright agreement with any third party.

- To ensure a smooth publication process, all selected works will be published and distributed by Accent Edition.

- Submission implies consent to grant Accent Edition the right to publish and promote the work. Accent Edition will respect the author’s moral rights and enter into a formal publication agreement with selected authors. Final terms will be subject to the signed agreement.

Submission Timeline:

- Open for submissions until December 31, 2025 (Eastern Time).

- Selected works will be announced in Spring 2026.

- Submissions will be reviewed in two rounds:

A preliminary review by the Accent editorial team
A final review by an invited jury of cross-disciplinary creators

Awards

- A total of 7 works will be selected and included in the Accent Anthology of Asian Women Crime Fiction, to be published by Accent Edition in 2026 Summer.

- Authors will receive free Accent Academy membership, two complimentary copies of the anthology, and an invitation to participate in the launch event at Accent Sisters in New York (available online and in-person; travel and accommodation costs not covered)

- One Grand Prize Winner will be selected by the jury and awarded a cash prize of 2,000 RMB (or 280 USD), in addition to the above benefits.

Jury Panel：

Preliminary Round (alphabetized by last name)

A Lan is a director, painter, artist, and advocate for women’s rights, as well as the editor-in-chief of Future Family. Her notable works include the art exhibitions Rebel from Beijing and Enter as You Wish, and the museum video pieces I Come to Abandon and The Sperm Seeker A-Lan. In September 2022, she completed her feature film This Woman, which was selected for the 2023 Visions du Réel in Switzerland, winning both the Zonta Prize for Women Filmmakers and the Jury Prize in the Burning Lights International Competition. The film had its domestic premiere at the FIRST International Film Festival in Xining in July 2023, where it received the annual film recommendation in the FIRST FRAME section.

Chirina Chen is an independent curator based in New York. She uses curating as a medium to explore intersections of critical posthumanism, material witness, and the aesthetics of crime. Her recent curatorial projects include Wandering in the Dark (The Chain Theater, New York); Probing Poetics (ACT Space, MIT); Dance of the Witches (Cyborg Foundation & Connelly Theater, New York); the nomadic performance series Collecting Depression in New York City; and Is This Intimacy? (University of Applied Arts Vienna & Krinzinger Projekte).

Earlier in her career, she worked at the FLAG Art Foundation in New York, contributing to exhibitions by artists such as Cecily Brown, Charles Ray, and Jeff Koons. She is currently an annual juror and curator for the New York chapter of the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) and a founding member of the New York Posthumanism Study Group. She was a keynote speaker in the Art and Philosophy section at the 25th World Congress of Philosophy in Rome.

She has organized seminars at institutions such as MIT and Columbia University, as well as in more unconventional settings like basements and lakesides. After studying posthuman philosophy at Utrecht University under Rosi Braidotti, she completed her MA at Sotheby’s Institute of Art in New York and earned her BA in Criminal Psychology and Art History from Syracuse University. Due to an archival error, she once took part in the FBI campus recruitment exam during college, only to be stopped at the first round upon discovery that she was not a U.S. citizen—a disappointment that ironically marked the beginning of her curatorial career.

Ruoyun Chen is an independent filmmaker and MIT Open Documentary Lab fellow. Her feature documentary People’s Republic of Letters was selected for the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), the FIRST International Film Festival, and other venues.

Jiaoyang Li is a poet and transmedia artist, and the co-founder of Accent Society and Accent Sisters Bookstore. Li’s writing, performances, visual art, and forums have been presented at New York Live Arts Center, Chashama, Creative Time, Pioneer Works, Mana Contemporary, Today Art Museum, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, the Immigrant Artist Biennial, Performa, Asymmetry Art Foundation, the New York Poetry Festival, Push the Boat Out Poetry Festival (Edinburgh), the International Poetry Festival of Greece, the New York Public Library, and more.

Jiaoyang Li has taught creative writing at New York University, Pratt Institute, the Chinese American Arts Council, and the Brooklyn Public Library. Her work has been featured in T Magazine, Artforum, ArtReview, LEAP, Los Angeles Review of Books, among other outlets. She has received grants and support from PEN America, Brooklyn Poets, New York Foundation for the Arts, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the British Council.

Na Zhong is a fiction writer based in New York. A MacDowell Fellow and a Center for Fiction Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellow, her work has appeared in The Drift, The Kenyon Review, swamp pink, Guernica, Carve, and others. Additionally, she writes a column at China Books Review and is the co-founder of Accent Accent, a writing community, bookstore, and publishing studio for multi-lingual, cross-disciplinary writers and artists. Her first novel, But Travelers Must Be Content, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press. Her first novella, Family Fragments, will be published by Joyland Editions.

Final Round - English Track (alphabetized by last name)：

Wah-Ming Chang is a writer and bookmaker whose work explores the waking dream. She received an MFA in creative writing from Cornell University, and her fiction has appeared in Brooklyn Rail and Joyland, among other publications, and her poetry in Works & Days. She has received fellowships and grants for fiction from Yaddo, the Ucross Foundation, the Bronx Council on the Arts, the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, and three times from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Hand, Held, her artist book about her father's art practice, is forthcoming from Bored Wolves. She has worked in trade book publishing for twenty-six years and is currently the senior managing editor at Catapult.

Elain Hsieh Chou is a Taiwanese American author and screenwriter from California. Her debut novel DISORIENTATION (Penguin Press / Picador) was a New York Times Editors' Choice Book, NYPL Young Lions Finalist and Thurber Prize for American Humor Finalist. The novel was optioned by AppleTV+ with Elaine set to adapt.

A former Rona Jaffe Graduate Fellow at NYU, her Pushcart Award-winning short fiction appears in Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Tin House Online, Ploughshares and The Atlantic, while her essays appear in The Cut and Vanity Fair. She is the recipient of the 2023 Fred R. Brown Literary Award. Her work has been supported by the Harry Ransom Center, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Hedgebrook writers-in-residence program.

Jianan Qian is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and holds a Ph.D. degree in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California. She writes in both Chinese and English. Her Chinese-language works include The Person Who Doesn’t Eat Eggs and Some Futures I Don’t Want to Go To. Her English fiction has appeared in Granta, The Los Angeles Review, The Millions, and other publications. She has received the Jury Prize of the Taiwan Times Literary Award and the O. Henry Prize in the United States.

Maria Whelan graduated from University College Dublin with a BA in English and Drama, then obtained her Masters in Modern Literature from the University of Edinburgh. She moved from Dublin to New York in the hopes of pursuing a career in publishing. Before joining InkWell, she worked as a Foreign Rights Assistant at Janklow & Nesbit and interned at Akashic Books. Maria enjoys a blend of literary and commercial fiction, as well as speculative fiction and magical realism. She is particularly fond of novels that straddle the cultural divide. She is looking for books in the fiction and nonfiction space that speak to the current cultural moment or examine overlooked facets of society.

Final Round - Chinese Track (alphabetized by last name):

He Wapi holds a BA in Journalism from Nanjing University and a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is the editor-in-chief of the WeChat public account Myrrh Garden. Her poetry and fiction have been published in numerous literary journals.

She is the author of novels including Fragile Goods, Love and Hate Are Each Other’s Cure, A Fine Shell Prepared for Her, Flowers and Medicine, and Dragon Tower Town. Fragile Goods was selected as one of Douban’s Top 10 Mystery and Suspense Books of 2024 and won the Blade Book Award for “Most Adaptable Work of the Year.”

She has also published several nonfiction works, including Reasoning with Myrrh Garden, which was named one of Southern Metropolis Daily’s Top 10 Books of 2019 and selected as one of Douban’s Top 10 Mystery and Suspense Books of 2019.

Mu Ming Congyun Gu is a Chinese speculative fiction writer and a programmer from Beijing, currently living in New York, US. She was born in 1988 in Chengdu, China, and has published short stories and novellas since 2016. Her stories can be found in magazines, anthologies and writing contests in multiple languages, including Clarkesworld and Samovar in English. She has won multiple awards since 2017, including three Douban Read’s Novella Writing Contest Awards, first prize for The 7th Masters of Future SF Writing Contest, the Best Short Story at the 31st Galaxy Awards and the Golden Award for the Best New Writer Award in the 11th Chinese Sci-Fi Nebula Award. She is also nominated for a 2021 IGNYTE Award for Best Short Story for her first English publication in Samovar. Her first collection Colora il Mondo was published in Italian in January 2021 and followed by her first Chinese collection The Serpentine Band And Other Stories in February 2023.

Ning Buyuan is a writer and the founder of lifestyle brand YUANJIA. She is the author of the essay collection Plain and Bright, the novels Mi Lian Fen, Lotus Cabbage, and Writing about My Father, as well as the poetry collection Relax with Effort, among other works.

Yi Tang was born and raised in Fuzhou, China, she signed a record deal with Universal Music Hong Kong after graduation and began her career as a singer-songwriter. In 2015, she released her debut EP Seriously, which topped the Hong Kong iTunes chart during its release week. In 2016, she applied to the NYU Tisch School of the Arts with a music video and was awarded a scholarship.

Her short film Little Anni’s Sheep won the Special Jury Prize at the AFI Fest and Best Live Action Short at the St. Louis International Film Festival. Her second short film All the Crows in the World won the Short Film Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and was supported by Johnnie To’s Fresh Wave International Short Film Festival.

Tang Yi was named one of “25 Screenwriters to Watch” by the Austin Film Festival in 2020. She describes herself as a “cinema nomad.” Recently, she participated in La Résidence du Festival in Paris, as well as Torino ScriptLab and Berlinale Script Station. Her works focus on stories about women, minorities, and social issues, often told in a subversive, darkly humorous cinematic style that has become her signature.

Jing Wang is a Beijing-based film producer. Her credits include Wen Shipei's LAND OF BROKEN HEARTS (Busan 2024) and ARE YOU LONESOME TONIGHT? (Cannes 2021); Han Shuai's GREEN NIGHT (Berlinale 2023); Johnny Ma's TO LIVE TO SING (Cannes 2019) and OLD STONE (Berlinale 2016) and Pei-Ju Hsieh's HEAVY CRAVING (Busan 2019). She received her M.F.A. in Creative Producing from Columbia University.

Yu Zhang is a graduate of the Directing Program at Tokyo University of the Arts. Her graduation film Killing Violet won the Audience Award in the Hidden Dragon section at the 7th Pingyao International Film Festival. She continues to explore her own cinematic language and aspires to become a director who also writes good fiction.