Women Who Submit

The Women Who Submit members included in this post published their work in amazing places during February of 2025, and three of our members heard about these opportunities through WWS programming and/or another member. We appreciate everyone’s commitment to sharing and celebrating their work, especially during these difficult times for our beloved Los Angeles. Thank you and happy submitting!

I’ve included an excerpt from published pieces (if available), along with a link (if available) to where the pieces can be purchased and/or read in their entirety. Please take a moment to extend congratulations to our members who had their work published this month.

Let’s start out by congratulating Rochelle Newman-Carrasco whose creative nonfiction piece “Gathering Variables” was featured in The New York Times’ Modern Love column.

We see flames from our porch. No mandatory evacuation — yet. But my husband and I agree. Let’s prepare. I take my parents’ wedding album. My typewritten play that only exists on paper. I scan shelves, drawers, closets. Thumbing through love letters and legal docs. Why this, and not that? Beyond practicalities, you have to let your gut lead. 

Kudos to Laura Sturza who published creative nonfiction piece “A Promise Through Time” with the same New York Times column listed above (excerpt available below). Her article “How These Dynamic Women Won the Ms. Senior America Pageant” was also featured in The Ethel.

We sit in deep recliners that buffer the effects of age, looking out the window at winter’s bare trees, the same ones we watch flourishing in spring. Mom and I wear matching blue wristwatches and check them regularly. She is 99 and counting. We worry about time. But at this moment, we have enough. 

Big shoutout to Lisa Eve Cheby for having her chapbooks Contact Tracing, Love Lessons from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Buffy Averts a Mid-Life Apocalypse republished with Strikethrough Press.

Congratulations to Ashton Cynthia Clarke whose poem “Planting for the Harvest” (and others) appeared in Four Feathers Press‘ Poetry Blogspot series.

She lives

a life 

well tilled

her time

like spring boughs 

laden heavy with faith 

and family 

harmony and heart


and memories . . . 

loves 

redolent of summer mamey 

take root beside 

acid limón of loss

they graft and grow 

new fruit inseparable

*Feature image credit to Margaret Gallagher*

The Women Who Submit members included in this post published their work in amazing places during January of 2025, and four of our members heard about these opportunities through WWS programming and/or another member. We appreciate everyone’s commitment to sharing and celebrating their work, especially during these difficult times for our beloved Los Angeles. Thank you and happy submitting!

I’ve included an excerpt from published pieces (if available), along with a link (if available) to where the pieces can be purchased and/or read in their entirety. Please take a moment to extend congratulations to our members who had their work published this month.

First up, let’s give a congratulations to Michelle Smith whose poem “Morning Decks & Decorum” was published with Four Feathers Press through their Saturday Afternoon Poetry Blogspot series (excerpt available below). She also published a poem entitled “Brightness” in Southern California Shadows with Four Feathers Press.

Fresh cut blades

of green grass stacked

on yards like neighborhood

houses. Awakens my olfactory

senses. Feeling

squishiness of the piled

high hill dancing in spring

coolness between my toes.

Big kudos to Ronna Magy for her publication of poems “Snow Globe” with Silver Birch Press (see excerpt below) and “Free Love” in Dionne’s Story, Volume IV Anthology with Carlow University Press.

between grandmother’s knobby fingers
brown coin-purse
frayed zipper
thread-bare days.
post second war
she counts bus quarters.
rations tickets for coffee sugar butter whole milk

we’re riding Detroit’s Woodward trolley.
downtown electricity
crackling Christmas lines
yellow car clanging
squeals to a stop.

Please give a shoutout to Dilys Wyndham Thomas whose poem “Elegy” was given a Pushcart Prize nomination by journal Rust and Moth, where it initially appeared in their Spring 2024 issue.

You will not appear in obituaries:
cells and the universe colliding,
contracting into an embryo, a whole
half with me since before I was born.
But they said this body could not keep you safe,
so I carved your name into my bones,
swallowed a pill that made a grave of my womb.

Congratulations to Yvette Siegert who translated five poems by Amanda Libertad and fiction piece “The Devil Knows My Name” by Jacinta Escudos from their original Spanish, which both appeared in Fence (the latter of which is shown below).

The Devil tells me everything

He comes to see me every day. He talks a lot. He tells me stories from every country in the world. About how human beings struggle and how they fear Evil, about how they spend their lives making up excuses so that they can give in to temptation and so be on good terms with both God and the Devil.

He tells me that he was once a charming prince, a man of flesh and bone like everyone else. Elegant and intelligent. Handsome. Wonderful. To such an extent that God chose him to become his favorite angel.  

 “But,” he says, “the problem is that I can’t stand taking orders from anyone.”

Big shoutout to Sibylla Nash who had an essay “It Happened To Me: I Almost Brought Home the Wrong Baby” featured in Another Jane Pratt Thing’s Substack blog.

Please give a congratulations to Marya Summers for publishing her poem “The Congregation” with Pensive Journal in their ninth issue.

Kudos to Ruby Hansen Murray for their poem “White Hair Memorial” which appeared in the Winter 2025 issue of Michigan Quarterly Review. She also published another poem “Devotion” in Elysium Review (see excerpt below).

For years, in the women’s rest room at Dismal Nitch,
a bouquet of wild flowers,
white honeyed verbena, stalks of grass.

How small things stitch the fabric of our lives,
river gray toward shore, the ridge beyond.

Shoutout to Jenise Miller whose article “How The Murals of Elliott Pinkney Captured the Creative Energy of Compton and Beyond” was featured in PBS SoCal.

At schools, churches, art centers, auto shops, health centers, and in neighborhoods, artist Elliott Pinkney painted bold swaths of color and every shade of brown reflected in the community. The murals he designed across Compton in the summers of 1977 and 1978 mirrored the creative energy and consciousness of the city. His art extended into Watts, South Central, Long Beach, Carson, Lynwood, and Berlin, Germany, in over 90* murals across 50 different sites, many of which involved a total of over 200 local youth (*multiple murals painted at one site were counted as individual murals; in a career that spanned over 50 years, this total was likely higher).

Lastly, please give a kudos to Diosa Xochiquetzalcoatl who published a poem entitled “Mojada” with FLUP and Venas Abiertas Editor Popular.

*Feature image credit to Margaret Gallagher*

Happy New Year! The Women Who Submit members included in this post published their work in amazing places during December of 2024, and four of our members heard about these opportunities through WWS programming and/or another member.

I’ve included an excerpt from published pieces (if available), along with a link (if available) to where the pieces can be purchased and/or read in their entirety. Please take a moment to extend congratulations to our dedicated members who had their work published this month, and happy submitting!

Let’s begin by extending a congratulations to Désirée Zamorano for publishing her essay “Echos of 1930s Expulsions, A Warning for Today” with The Latino Newsletter.

The Republican Party campaigned for power by threatening to rip the lives of 20 million people from the fabric of this country. As horrifying a premise as it is, this act of political depravity has happened before.

Beginning in the 1930s, an estimated 1 million people —Mexican Americans and Mexican nationals— were expelled from this country. Following the Great Depression, Mexicans were targeted and scapegoated for taking jobs from “real” Americans and exploiting social welfare resources. The Hoover administration, scrambling to stay in power, gave cities and states authority as to how they would rid themselves of these “undesirables.” The smears used against this demographic have embedded themselves into the historic and now daily discourse of immigration.

Kudos to Romaine Washington whose poems “Puzzled,” “Ars Poetica in Bloom,” and “Secondary Cento” were published in Saltwater: A Wild Seed Poetry & Arts Collective Anthology.

Big shoutout to Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo whose poem “God Was Not” was featured in Poetry Magazine’s December 2024 issue (excerpt below). Her poems “When I Wince” & “Making an Amends to Myself for Letting Men Use Me” were also published in Riot of Roses Publishing House’s anthology SOMOS XICANAS.

in your kiss or fingertips,
or how you liked to say goodbye,
arms squeezing through my middle
to lift my body from the ground

till bones cracked up my back.
Like a child’s xylophone,
you played me into laughter,
but not in the good way giggles

Please join me in congratulating Deirdre Hennings for publishing her poem “Midnight, Wisconsin” in Humana Obscura‘s eleventh issue.

We’d lost the moon.

As if in the bottom of a well
or some vast pit of sea
we floated,
nothing tethered
but our soles.
Each gravel-y step a search
in blackness so deep
we were nothing
but beating hearts

Shoutout to Erin Jourdan whose fiction piece “Chimeras” appeared in Epiphany Issue 33.

Please give kudos to Jesenia Chávez whose creative nonfiction piece “A Meditation on Shopping Carts” was featured in Air/Light Magazine (see excerpt below). She also published a personal essay entitled “Abuelita Josefina Presente!” and a poem “Now I am crying” in Riot of Roses Publishing House’s anthology SOMOS XICANAS.

Shopping cart as found art

A shopping cart sits at the foot of the trail, perhaps because of the last “clean-up.” This is what they call it when they kick everyone out who has made a home in the hidden hills of Debs Park. Once I went off trail and into a camp and ran back the other way because I was scared.  

Shopping carts are upside down on the riverbed, on the sidewalk right side up. Someone managed to push these shopping carts off a grocery store parking lot. This has given the carts new life. 

Congratulations to Lorinda Toledo whose memoir piece “Chile Season” was selected as the second place winner of Exposition’s Review‘s Flash 405 “Otherworldly” Contest.

Kudos to Jasmine Vallejo-Love for their creative nonfiction piece “Breaking the Comb Ceiling” being picked up by Lunch Ticket.

There were four hard knocks on the door; the kind only the police made. We froze, every muscle still, breath slowing down. My eyes focused firmly on the hardwood floor, tears slow-danced down my cheeks, snot bubbles in my eight-year-old nose, little fists clenched. The loud squeaking of the front door, in desperate need of WD-40, signaled Mom had opened it.

Shoutout to Bonnie S. Kaplan whose poem “Wildlife Crossings” was featured in The Nature of Our Times.

A camel crossing in Kuwait, an elk overpass in Banff,

these culverts and corridors stitch together land

severed by highway, invaded by interstates,

our open road — their dissipating gene pool.

We make necessary reparations for wildlife,

dig a desert underpass for the tortoise,

reroute the deer in the headlights.

We all need to travel

safely home.

Huge congratulations to Ryane Nicole Granados for her novella The Aves being published with Leapfrog Press.

Kudos to M. Anne Kala’i whose fiction piece “The Visitation” appeared in Halfway Down the Stairs.

In June, Sadie and Lee filed into our home with news and the peach pie it had inspired: Sadie was pregnant. My sister was smiling but wouldn’t look at me. If our parents saw how scared she was, they didn’t let on. She hadn’t been married a month. The couple had said their vows in the same place she and I were born, the same place our mother was born: up the road, at Gran’s.

Over dinner, Mother asked how their new place was suiting them, though it wasn’t new. Sadie had moved into Lee’s efficiency apartment next to the filling station he owned. Maybe, Dad said, they ought to consider moving in with Gran before the baby arrived. I liked the idea, for the place was visible from my bedroom window.

Please join me in giving a shoutout to Desiree Kannel for publishing the book review “Infusing Her Los Ángeles Roots in The Aves, by Ryane Nicole Granados” in Los Angeles Literature.

The Aves, by Ryane Nicole Granados is a masterful coming-of-age story that introduces the world to ten-year-old Zora and her 1980s Los Ángeles neighborhood, affectionately called, The Aves. This Los Ángeles neighborhood is filled with an eclectic mix of residents, friends, and friends-turn-family who Zora learns to love and appreciate as she enters her teenage years. Zora narrates her stories and although the neighborhood is what we would now label marginalized, we soon learn that the residents of the Aves are made up of more than their economic status.

Congratulations to Diosa Xochiquetzalcoatl whose poem “Her Favorite Little Word, ¡Ya Basta!” was featured in Riot of Roses Publishing House’s anthology SOMOS XICANAS.

Lastly, big kudos to Flint whose performance poem piece “crawling…” was featured in Beyond Queer Words – A Queer Anthology.

In addition to celebrating your wonderful literary accomplishments, I hope you are resting up and spending this time of year with family, friends, and pets (or curled up next to a book). Stay warm and congratulations once again!

*Feature image credit to Margaret Gallagher*

Hello everyone and happy November! The Women Who Submit members included in this post published their work in amazing places during November of 2024 (and five of our members heard about these opportunities either through WWS programming and/or another member, which is a wonderful tribute to this community!).

I’ve included an excerpt from published pieces (if available), along with a link (if available) to where the pieces can be purchased and/or read in their entirety. Please take a moment to extend congratulations to our amazing members who had their work published this month, and happy submitting!

Please give a shoutout to Melissa Chadburn whose creative nonfiction piece “Rarebit” appeared on Terrain.org.

I saw it in my mother’s face sometimes when she shook me by the shoulders. The other face she so often showed to the world, the one she wore in church and at work long gone. This one—the angry one—was it her legit face? Was she always working to suppress it? Maybe so. Maybe she was aswang—a shapeshifting, baby-eating vampire. Secretary by day, soul sucker by night. I could see that. Maybe she was a witch; all these women who live alone, who know longing, they’re called witches. 

Huge congratulations to Love TaShia Asanti whose fiction novels The Seer: Legacy of Stone & Spirit and Any Heart Open have been published and are now available for purchase!

Kudos to Marya Summers for her poem entitled “On This Post-Election Shore, 2024” being featured in Dissident Voice.

Today, election results run, a river
of grief for another river that never
became a wave. Tomorrow, perhaps
a collapse we never imagined:
a bridge, a body, a body
politic, the world.

Still, the tide comes & goes.
As I stand in the sand, the under-
tow pulls my heels, dragging
me insistently deeper. These
returns can suck folks
in beyond their depth, so I know not
to wade further into turbulence,
into a world half-eaten, equal parts
hoorays & handkerchiefs.

Big shoutout to Monona Wali for her fiction piece “Love Thy Monster” being picked up by Santa Monica Review.

Please join me in congratulating Heather Pegas whose fiction piece “The Mermaid Has Finally Had It” was published with Does It Have Pockets?

It is the mermaid’s birthday, and she’s feeling her age. Sailors still like the shape of her tail, it gets their attention, but they turn away at the missing breast, the scarred floor of her chest. They see her hair has turned grey-green, call her a merma’am, and laugh.

The mermaid’s daughter and her friends need constant reassurance and talking down from erotic encounters with fickle seamen. They are forever falling in, and painfully out of, “love” but they reject her hard-won wisdom.

Congratulations to Lauren Salerno for their article “How Princess Leia teaches us not to lose hope as we head into another Trump presidency” being featured in The Mary Sue.

Times like these always lead me back to my Patron Saint of Hope, Leia Organa. Being a life-long Star Wars fan, my relationship to Leia is something that evolves as I go through changes in my own life. That relationship took a new turn in 2017 when I attended the Women’s March in Los Angeles. It was an important moment for me in my political life. The streets of Downtown Los Angeles were packed with people who knew that the next 4 years would not be easy.

Big kudos to Diosa Xochiquetzacoatl whose poems “Gigage,” “Tethered Tongues,” and “Diaspora” were chosen as a feature by the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs in the 2024 Native American Heritage Month Calendar and Cultural Guide. See excerpt from “Gigage” below:

Red is the blood that boils within my veins. Red are the murdered and missing.
Red is the lipstick he sees as slut. Red are my eyes filled with rage.
Red is the war paint tattooed on my skin. Red are the hands of every broken treaty.

Shoutout to Laura Sturza whose creative nonfiction piece “The Super Saleswoman” appeared in Oldster Magazine. She also published “Our own Golden Bachelorette” in The Beacon. See excerpt of the former below:

Mom put those skills to work in future jobs. She became a saleswoman for whom “no” meant revving up for advanced negotiations. After her dad passed away, Mom revealed he’d been a terrible salesman. “He laid it on too thick,” she said. “They saw his desperation. You have to reel customers in with a good story, make them believe they can’t live without what you’re selling.

Please join me in congratulating Valerie Anne Burns whose creative nonfiction piece “Cornflower Blue” was featured in Sad Girl Diaries.

While my mother was still alive, we’d moved to a brand-new home in one of those strangely uniformed suburbs in South Miami. Because blue was her favorite color, the walls inside were mostly shades of blue, and the exterior was painted in a soft shade of sky blue. The builders of the houses in that neighborhood swept away every natural thing in sight as they put up countless blocks of new homes leaving one lonely palm tree to sway in the breeze.

Lastly, kudos to Carla Sameth for the publication of her poem “Thanksgiving” in Mutha Magazine.

Before the crab stuffing and the molten greens,
the grieving turkey, crispy leg reserved
for my wife, there is this year’s drink—
tamarind, tequila, lime, mint, soda, jalapeño,
and champagne. I am the eager taster, hiding
in the corner from my previously sober son.
Fix you a non-alcoholic drink? I ask jerkily
while he lurks nearby this tureen of booze.
Really, everywhere you look there’s booze,
wine and beer and champagne, drinks that look
like innocent cans of soda named spicy or fully loaded.
Would you name your car, your cat, your girlfriend that? 
Do what you need to do my son, I murmur.

*Feature image credit to Margaret Gallagher*

🌰 As with the beginning of a new season, there are new publications to share! 🍂 The WWS members included in this post published their work in amazing places during September of 2024. I’ve included an excerpt from published pieces (if available), along with a link (if available) to where the pieces can be purchased and/or read in their entirety.

Please take a moment to extend congratulations to our wonderful members who had their work published this month, and happy submitting!

Huge congratulations to Laura Sturza for her humor/opinion piece “Cats Are Ready to Cast Their Votes for Kamala Harris” published in Medium and her story “Pedal Power” published in Unfolding: A Market Street Writers Anthology. See excerpt of the former below:

Our cats are frustrated that they have previously been denied the right to support a candidate who will advocate for their rights as members of an interspecies family. While Republican candidates have yet to comment on the sanctity of interspecies families like ours, I think their position can be guessed. On the other hand, Harris is an animal rights advocate endorsed by the Humane Society. Walz’s interspecies family includes orange tabby Afton, who is prepared to move to the vice-presidential mansion.

Big shoutout to Désirée Zamorano for her latest novel Dispossessed and a blog post for the novel entitled “Peeling Away Decades of Whitewashing Our History: On the Writing of the Novel, Dispossessed” in La Bloga (see below for an excerpt). What a huge accomplishment!

From the 1930s to the 1950s an estimated 2 million people, Mexican Americans and Mexican nationals, were expelled from this country. Few of us know about this essential American history. The famous line, “A single death is a tragedy, million deaths is a statistic,” informed me that that’s how our history would have to be portrayed, through the life of someone buffeted and impacted by this historical event. I kept waiting for someone to write that novel. I looked around and waited some more. I waited long enough to realize that someone was me.

Please join me in congratulating Rachael Rifkin for the publication of her article “Non-Nuclear Families — Out of Necessity — Are Sought After, and on the Rise” in Good Housekeeping.

Amidst changes in the economy, urbanization, immigration, caregiving burnout, rising loneliness and marriage and reproduction rates, however, there’s been a shift away from the self-reliant nuclear family as the center for family life. In fact, there is no one predominant family form anymore. Instead, people are returning to the idea of having a strong support network and living with or near the people we’re closest with, just like we did for most of humanity. In fact, it’s become such a ubiquitous desire that if you’re having a conversation with someone of millennial age or younger, it’s only a matter of time before they wistfully bring up their dream of getting a plot of land with their friends and living in a more communal way.

Kudos to Monica Cure for translating and publishing three poems by Adela Greceanu in Romanian poetry anthology Cigarettes Until Tomorrow and in The Dial. Excerpt from “Goose” below:

Words are also a province
when it comes to the lively meanings beneath them,
meanings unimaginable there, above.
However
tartine, quasi-unfamiliar, and to handle a relationship
are words spoken with such power
that they yanked up from underneath them
a meaning that made them synonyms.
Though only for me, to be fair.

Please give a shout out to Deirdre Hennings whose poem “Life after Transplant” (among others) was featured in Volume 17:Issue 2 of Ars Medica.

I cringe when the car peels out
I’d rather not be here
you’re so moody again, so often angry now—

Kudos to Diana Radovan for publishing her creative nonfiction piece “Oh, My Friend, How Is Your Blue?” in Humans of the World.

I’m on my way to the Berchtesgaden National Park. It is Friday afternoon and between seasons. The trees still have red, old leaves. Winter catches me on the way. A snow blizzard takes over the roads, slowing all the cars down.

I’m stuck at the top of a mountain road in the middle of a snowstorm, just 10 km before my final destination of the day in Berchtesgaden National Park.

Let’s give a big congratulations to Jesenia Chavez whose poem “Pictures of You” was featured in the Latino Book Review Magazine.

I wonder what my grandfather’s hands were like,
Playing clarinete, what did he sound like?
Where did he practice? What were his botas and
huaraches like?

How did the músicos travel from town to town?
On horseback, on foot?
How did you request them?

Please join me in giving a shoutout to Dilys Wyndham Thomas whose poem “a ghazal for Doggerland” was picked up by Ink Sweat & Tears (see excerpt below). She also published her poems “Channel Seascape” and “still lives” in The Passionfruit Review.

we walk through the exhibition hall lost
amongst water-logged bones, a sunk haul lost

grave-deep underwater, newly unearthed
as North-Sea fishing boats treasure-trawl lost

Congratulations to Heather Pegas who published fiction piece “I Did Not Die” in Weird Lit Magazine.

Since he’s been gone, she has dodged thirty-seven calls from her sister and been forced to answer eighteen. Gloria, her astrologer friend, has called twenty-two times, been spoken to twelve. For twenty-nine meals in a row she’s eaten a lump of cottage cheese with a handful of Goldfish crackers on top. She has gone through thirty cartons of Tillamook ice cream, but only nine liters of vodka. It has been ninety-two days since he’d gone, so she considers this restraint.

On one of those days, she made it to the gym and swam four complete laps before the weight of her body sank her. She’d come home and thumbed through thirteen old copies of The New Yorker. Why were they even still here? 

Kudos to Stephanie Yu whose fiction piece “A Knock at the Door” was picked up by Wigleaf.

Larry and Susan are sitting arms folded at opposite ends of the couch when their elderly neighbor knocks at the door. She is holding a measuring cup and asks if they have some flour for an apple cake she is making. Susan takes the cup, sifts the flour, taking care not to leave air pockets. Larry makes terse conversation with their neighbor at the front door, his fingers tightening reflexively against the knob whenever she leans forward to speak. Weeks later, their neighbor slips while getting out of the shower and dies. Susan will discover her when she checks on her three days later, having noticed the smell.

Last and certainly not least, please join me in giving a resounding congrats to Ronna Magy who published her poem “Distance” in The Cost of Our Baggage Anthology from Gnashing Teeth Publishing.

At least three of our members published in September heard about these opportunities through Women Who Submit. Thank you for your wonderful community and encouragement! Happy Fall! 🎃

*Feature image credit to Margaret Gallagher*