We’re looking for stories that cut through the noise — from people living the contradictions of this moment: layoffs and rent hikes, ICE raids and border patrol crackdowns, automation, strikes and small acts of defiance, survival and solidarity. If you’ve seen or lived something that speaks to how working-class people make sense of these times, Hard Crackers wants to hear from you.
Hard Crackers is a magazine of people’s stories — accounts from the streets, workplaces, prisons, schools, and neighborhoods that reveal the contradictions of everyday life in America. We publish writing that looks beneath the surface of social and political issues, showing how ordinary people navigate, challenge, and sometimes reproduce the forces that shape their lives.
We’re now putting together our next print issue, and we’re looking for essays, narratives, and firsthand accounts that capture the realities of life in this moment. We want writing that brings readers face to face with the struggles unfolding across the country — from the coming recession and mass layoffs to housing insecurity, from Immigration raids to everyday efforts to hold things together. These stories might come from workplaces, detention centers, shelters, or kitchens — anywhere the contradictions of the system are felt and fought.
We’re also watching, with outrage and heartbreak, the renewed mobilization of ICE and Border Patrol, the surveillance and policing of immigrants, and the militarization of everyday life in working-class neighborhoods. But even here, we find courage — in the ways people resist raids, hide one another, pass messages, and keep their dignity.
We invite writing that captures these contradictions and complexities — stories that show how people make meaning, resist, or simply get by in hard times. These can be:
- Firsthand accounts, interviews, or reflections from workplaces, streets, and homes.
- Observations of everyday struggles — against eviction, hunger, police harassment, or deportation.
- Portraits of courage, anger, humor, or endurance that reveal the human face of our social order.
- Essays that link lived experience to the larger systems of class, race, gender, and power.
We are not an academic journal or a literary magazine, but a collective effort to document and interpret the world as it is lived. Hard Crackers bridges storytelling and political analysis — showing how people’s lives express the contradictions of our time, and how within those contradictions lie both tragedy and hope.
If you have a story that fits — something you’ve lived, witnessed, or simply can’t shake — we’d like to hear from you. Send a draft, a pitch, or just a few sentences about your idea.
Send us your submission no later than February 15, 2026 to be considered for our next print issue.