NTI Heart zine
Founding Editor
Michelle Hamilton
Editorial Team
Michelle Hamilton
Camille Roulière
Elizabeth McDougal
The diversity of NTI’s student body, and the collaborative approach to learning where students co-create meaning together, often leads to profound conversations as students embody and contextualise their learning. Regularly, students and teachers express the learning that is taking place and discuss their experiences in creative ways.
NTI Heart is a student zine designed to capture some of this creativity. Its aim is to provide a space for NTI students, alumni and staff members to share their NTI-inspired creative outputs for the purpose of inspiring and moving others.
In many ways, this student-led, staff-supported project is imagined as the creative and conversational pendant to the Hsing Yun Education Foundation’s journal, Studies on Humanistic Buddhism. It also takes inspiration from Mirrors to Wisdom, a series of works published in 2020 following a workshop on Buddhist poetry as part of the Communities of Practice led by Venerable Dr Juewei.
Building on these two publications, NTI Heart is offered to the wider community to disseminate both joy and food for thought as it captures the creative impulses inherent to the transformative nature of the NTI educational experience. The first volume will be released in the first half of 2027.
Call for Submissions: NTI Heart, Volume 1
We are welcoming submissions for the first volume of the student zine NTI Heart, which will be published in the first half of 2027.
For this inaugural volume, our primary focus is on poetry. We are interested in poems that arose from your experience at NTI. We seek authentic poems that speak of, and to, heart, body and brain. We particularly welcome poems written in response to
- subject materials
- conversations with peers
- insights you gained while studying or teaching
- classroom experiences
- any aspect of the dharma
- the values of NTI and Humanistic Buddhism
- the slow, and often messy, process of learning and writing
- the role of collaboration when teaching and learning
- your reading experience at NTI.
We encourage you to experiment with language and welcome multilingual works. Poems entirely in a language other than English are also welcome provided that you submit a human-written English translation or explanation alongside them.
Please use this link to submit your work in a Word document. Email or in-person submissions will not be accepted.
Generative AI (GenAI) guidelines
GenAI use is strictly prohibited. We reserve the right to reject any submissions that we suspect might have been entirely or partially written using GenAI.
Submission deadline and selection process
NTI Heart, volume 1: submit by 20 December 2026, 11.59 pm (AEDT). Late submissions will not be accepted.
We are a small team of volunteers, and we thank you for your patience as we take the time to review every submission with the care it deserves.
If you do not hear back from us by 21 March 2027, you can assume that your work has not been selected for this volume of NTI Heart. This is not a reflection on the quality or value of your work but linked to editorial decisions made to ensure we publish a well-balanced volume.