We hope you and your loved ones are well during these challenging times, and that these literary successes from women in our community bring some hope and joy.
From Anita Gill‘s “Banghra” at The Offing:
As laughter echoed in the lobby of the Katzen Arts Center, I began to ponder collective nouns. If a group of crows is a murder and a group of owls is a parliament, what would the term be for a group of undergraduates? No word came to mind, so I christened the gathered American University students a “headache.”
From Toni Ann Johnson‘s “The Megnas” at Vida:
We knew about the Arringtons before they got here. Irv Silverman tap-tapped on our back door the day the moving truck driver refused to venture up his black diamond-run driveway. Irv asked if the guy could use ours. Of course we were accommodating. We were good neighbors. Ours stretched down from Oakland Avenue in the back, instead of up from Stage Road in the front, and it was a bunny hill compared to his. So, the driver came that way and the truck pulled onto Irv’s property from ours. There was never a “for sale” sign and Irv waited until then, when it was obvious, to tell us he was moving.
From “Avenging Angel” by Désirée Zamorano at the Los Angeles Review of Books:
When we first meet Lily Wong, the protagonist of Tori Eldridge’s The Ninja Daughter, she is in an empty, desolate building, hanging from a platform, sardonically addressing her Ukrainian tormentor in a bid to extend her life and interrupt the pain of his swinging rope.
Congratulations to Désirée whose story, “Habia Una Vez,” was published at Crab Creek Review!
Congratulations to Noriko Nakada who had two poems, “Family Haiku” and “Meditation on the Morning Spent at the Soccer Field,” published at The Tiger Moth Review! From “Family Haiku”:
Our Family Name / translated into English / means in rice field, to
flee Okinawa’s / smattering of rocky isles / overrun with pests.
Sail amber waves for / land in America where / anything will grow.
Congratulations to Lituo Huang who had two poems, “Prize” and “05.09.2020,” published at Decameron Writing Series. From “Prize”:
The first time I saw the claw machine, I was at a guy’s birthday party. The guy was someone my sister had dated a few times. The party was at Dave and Buster’s because the guy was turning twenty-one. I went even though I was thirty-one and hadn’t been invited.
From Carla Sameth‘s “What to Read When You Need to See Someone Else’s Light and Darkness” at The Rumpus:
Already imperfect, memory is often fragmented and fragile with trauma, making telling our stories more elusive. Just as life does not usually move in a straightforward, organized narrative, my stories were not always moving toward a linear, traditional format. In fact, while I was working on my manuscript, I found that its main characters kept messing up my story arc. Sometimes writing in alternative forms can help to excavate this material, so this is one of the things I looked for in my reading.
The books below were my friends on the road to publishing One Day on the Gold Line, waiting on my bookshelves whenever I needed their company.
More congrats to Carla whose poems, “Each Day” and “Not Hand in Hand,” were published in Sheltering in Place at Staring Problem Press!
Congrats to Karin Aurino who had two poems, “My Name is Wife” and “My Man Stayed with Me,” published at North Dakota Quarterly!
Check out Sarine Balian‘s “1840” at The Coachella Review!
Congrats to Lauren Eggert-Crowe whose poem “I Have Not Taken Proper Advantage of Scorpio Season” was published in Gigantic Sequins!