IHRAM Press’s Our Roots collects writing about land, climate, and displacement

# What this issue is and why it matters

IHRAM Press published Our Roots, the second issue of its 2026 literary magazine, on July 30, 2026. The 137-page paperback collects poetry, prose, fiction, and visual art around the theme "Stories of Land and Climate." The press is the literary arm of the International Human Rights Art Movement (IHRAM), an organization based in Queens, New York, that supports artist-activists and writers working on urgent social issues.

# Editorial framing

The editor's opening note frames the issue around a concrete problem: accelerating global warming produces emotional and social harms—unrest, displacement, and eroded relations to place—that governments often ignore. The issue tracks those harms in bodies and memories, showing how climate change reshapes everyday experience and ancestral ties.

# What's inside: forms and standout pieces

The collection mixes short and long forms and moves through a global geography. Representative pieces named in the issue include:

• Poems: "Magnolia," "Black Rhino," and "The Sea Is Warmer Now."

• Fiction: "The Herd," "The Protector," and "Bitter Waters," works that lean into fable and speculative elements.
• Visual art: a mixed-media piece titled "Rooted," built around the knot metaphor, and a closing section that introduces the contributing authors and artists.

Together these works examine bodily experience, ancestral memory, and local ecologies as climate change alters familiar landscapes.

# How this issue fits IHRAM's mission

IHRAM Press has established itself by publishing artists-in-exile, activists, and writers who confront suppression and displacement. Our Roots continues that work by providing an open-submission platform for lesser-known and emerging voices engaging social and environmental urgencies. The pieces foreground emotional truth—loss, grief, attachment—and present climate change as both a physical and cultural process that rearranges lives and identities.

# Availability and how to read it

# Short practical takeaways

• The issue emphasizes emotional and embodied responses to climate change rather than technical or policy analysis.
• It balances geographic range with concentrated attention to African landscapes and memories tied to land.
• The mixture of genres—poetry, essays, fiction, visual art—offers multiple modes for readers to approach climate-related displacement and loss.

# Final note

If you are looking for literary responses to climate change that prioritize memory, place-based witness, and the lived consequences of environmental collapse, Our Roots compiles a range of forms and geographies that address those concerns directly.