Erase House Bill 229
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Call for erasure poetry in response to Texas House Bill 229
"Erasure, like any form, arrests the poet’s access to unlimited language, birthing new opportunities for invention and innovation."
— Chase Berggrun
Bundle Press invites submissions of erasure poetry and erasure artwork that respond to Texas House Bill 229, legislation that attempts to define "sex" based on reproductive organs and erase trans and intersex people.
View the house bill source text here: https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/89R/billtext/pdf/HB00229I.pdf
Why Erasure?
Erasure poetry is a creative response that engages directly with the original source text by removing words. Erasure can be a tool of civic engagement in conversation with—or in defiance of—harmful public policy and laws. When legislation takes risk so casually, even maliciously, with language, erasure has a unique ability to reframe and reconfigure, taking power back. As we learn from Chase Berggrun's essay in Poetry (May 2025),
"When we erase a text that was created by another we are enacting a violence upon it. This can be acceptable: perhaps the text is so abhorrent that it deserves such treatment! But this should never be a comfortable process. When well done, an erasure poem can turn the knife around. It can be a violence against violence. It can move across time. When we cut away the present of a document, we are allowing something new to be born out of absence: a process full of both possibility and risk."
We welcome erasures of HB 229 that speak back to the bill's narrow definitions, transform the text, and take risks to imagine wider possibilities.
How to Submit:
Please send 1–3 poems attached as separate PDFs without identifying information
to contact[at]bundlepress[dot]org with the subject line “Erase HB229.”
Please include a 1–3 sentence author bio in the body of the email.
Submissions for Erase HB229 will close on Friday, July 31, 2026.
"ACLU of Texas Comments on Passage of H.B. 229 - Discriminatory Definition of Sex Bill," ACLU, press release, May 18, 2025, https://www.aclutx.org/press-releases/aclu-texas-comments-passage-hb-229-discriminatory-definition-sex-bill/
Eleanor Klibanoff, "Texas Just Defined Man and Woman," Texas Tribune, May 29, 2025, https://www.texastribune.org/2025/05/29/texas-trans-sex-definition-state-documents-impact/
"Texans Born Without Traditional Sex Traits Worry Law Will Force Them to Choose Gender They Don't Identify With," Houston Public Media, February 11, 2026, https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/health-science/healthcare/2026/02/11/543105/texas-intersex-sex-definition-hb-229/