Accolades: A Women Who Submit Anthology
In 2019, Women Who Submit will celebrate submissions and acceptances in partnership with Jamii Publishing, an Inland Empire independent press. This anthology is made possible by the Investing in Tomorrow Organizational Grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation with support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
For our inaugural anthology, Women Who Submit welcomes submissions of work published between 2016 and 2018 from all WWS members. Make sure you have permission from the original publication to reprint the piece. Work that features women and non-binary characters prominently in a positive manner are encouraged. Pieces that include multiple identities or marginalized perspectives are also encouraged.
Submission Guidelines can be found here.
For this issue of Behind the Editor’s Desk, I’m talking to WWS leaders Tisha Reichle-Aguilera and Rachael Warecki, managing editors of Accolades. All of us in WWS leadership are grateful for Tisha and Rachael’s fantastic and diligent work in creating the Call for Submissions and being the point people on this project.
FAQs
How do I know what work I should submit?
We are looking for work by our WWS members, which was accepted and published anytime between 2016 and 2018. In order to accommodate and celebrate as many members’ work as possible, we have implemented word count and page requirements.
Rachael Warecki: We’re looking for work that’s been previously published during your time as a Women Who Submit member — no more than 5,000 words in fiction and nonfiction, or 3-5 poems of no more than seven pages. Flash fiction writers can submit up to three pieces of no more than 1,000 words each.
How do I know if I’m a member of Women Who Submit?
If you attended a Women Who Submit Submission Strategy Session or Chapter gathering, you are considered a WWS member.
How do I know if I retain the rights to my published work to submit to the anthology?
This varies by publication. Most of the time, rights for an individual piece revert back to the author after publication. But check with the editors of the journal that published you if you are not sure.
What are the editors looking for in these submissions?
Send us work published between 2016 and 2018. Send us work that you are proud of, that showcases your best writing strengths.
Work that features women and non-binary characters prominently in a positive manner are encouraged. Pieces that include multiple marginalized identities or perspectives are also encouraged.
Tisha Reichle-Aguilera: We have also talked about making sure we have a variety of submissions, across genres and topics, from women and non-binary writers across the country.
Here are some thoughts from our great managing editors.
Tisha: When we started this journey, I reached out to WWS member Sarah Rafael Garcia because I knew she had experience editing an anthology and I’d submitted to her for a special issue of a literary journal. She met with me and gave me tips for organizing submissions and responses to them, as well as ways to strategically curate the anthology once we have all of our submissions. Also part of the process has been coordinating with Nikia Chaney at Jamii Publishing.
Co-editing with Rachael is great because I feel like we have a shared aesthetic vision for how we want to the anthology to look and feel. (I brought a bag full of all my anthologies to our first meeting so we could touch them and critique/compliment them.)
Rachael: I was about to say, I really like working with Tisha! We’re both solution-oriented, but we always make sure to approach questions thoughtfully. I’m also excited to be working on a project that celebrates members of our Women Who Submit community!
Tisha: We complement each other because Rachael is so much more skilled with all things technological and artistic, so she has ways for making that vision come to life.
If you have more questions about submitting to the anthology, check out the Submission Guidelines here. Have more questions? Leave a comment below or get in touch with us on our Facebook page.