SXSW 2025 Innovation Award Finalist
Newsletter 019
Dear Writers,
We’re excited to share some special news with you all: Switch-Lit has been selected as a finalist for the SXSW 2025 Innovation Award!
Switch-Lit is among five (5) finalists from around the world chosen specifically for the SXSW Innovation Award category of “Connection and Communication”:
“The ‘Connection and Communication’ category features projects aimed at helping people discover meaningful ways of enriching human experiences and interactions.”
You can check out Switch-Lit on the SXSW website as part of their own official announcement of other finalists, and of course, their signature lineup of indie music acts, film/television premieres, artist exhibitions, and creative talks galore.
The Portland-based team will be going to SXSW, but we also share this global honor with the other half of the team based in Utrecht, Netherlands – Studio Airport and September Digital, who are also SXSW alumni via Emergence Magazine.
What will we do at SXSW?
Switch-Lit will have a dedicated showcase area at the SXSW Conference in Austin, Texas on March 8th, so we’re preparing our in-person Switch-Lit experience for Innovation Award judges, attendees, investors, and press.
Our main goal is to network with new Switch-Lit partners in support of the full vision of Switch-Lit – writers, literary editors/agents, film producers (i.e. Switch-Lit-inspired documentary series), writing educators or public librarians (i.e. Switch-Lit “Education Kit”), and even mental health professionals (i.e. Switch-Lit as a supplemental tool for therapeutic practices).
How can you be a part of this?
Submit your stories – We’d love to showcase your surreal, dream-like Switch-Lit stories as the first additions of the Switch-Lit Library for our in-person showcase at SXSW, so if you’ve got a story in the works and it might be on track to finish this month, then consider this an encouraging nudge!
Share the news – We’d love to generate a little buzz and press leading up to the SXSW Innovation Award, so feel free to check out our Switch-Lit Press & Media Kit and forward to any press contacts who might be inspired to write a story about Switch-Lit at SXSW, or more broadly – collaborative fiction as a creative angle into today’s tech scene, culture wars, and mental health landscape.
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Thanks for being part of this unpredictable and collective journey so far. We’ll continue to support all of you, so that you may continue to support your partners, all towards the creation of new worlds and stories unimaginable by a single mind.
More soon,
– Ken
S••L Editor
Featured prompt:
Prompt 5
A solitary artist befriends a venomous snake.
Did you know?
The Texas coral snake is the second most venomous snake in the world but is also extremely docile and shy. Though their venom is highly toxic, they do not have an effective poison-delivery system which is why no deaths have been reported in North America since the late 1960s. If untreated by anti-venom, symptoms include slurred speech, double vision, and muscular paralysis.
Don’t give up.
In many conversations I realize that the thing that’s being said is really not the point at all, there’s this subterranean exchange of contexts, emotions, and unspoken signals.
– Claudia Rankine from The Paris Review
Contact us:
📟 Ping us with any questions, requests, or proposals for Switch-Lit:
editors@switch-lit.com