The WWS members included in this post published their work in amazing places during December 2023. 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 join me in celebrating our members who published in December 2023!
Congratulations to Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera, whose YA novel Breaking Pattern was published by the Inlandia Institute. You can listen to her read “September Junior Rodeo,” a chapter from Breaking Pattern, on LatinX Audio Lit Mag.
Congrats also to Elizabeth Galoozis, whose poem “that’s the spirit” appeared in Gold Man Review.
Kudos to Daria E. Topousis, whose book review “The Reader in the Book by Stephen Orgel” appeared in Book Club of California Quarterly.
A shout out to Ashunda Norris, whose poem “Blueprint for Blk Girl Survival” appeared in Gulf Coast. Ashunda’s poem “America Eats Its Young” also appeared in Evergreen Review.
Which of the following political symbols is omnipresent?
a. the supreme court
b. hollywood
c. the Black church
Congratulations to Amy Shimshon-Santo, whose essay “Safe” appeared in Tikkun.
Two weeks ago, a loud siren pulled us from sleep. I rose from the bed I shared with my daughter to meet my cousin in the hallway. The night before was Shabbat of Simcha Torah. We’d gathered across four generations with 29 members of our family to share food and light candles. We took photos of the reunion of two sisters, my mother and my aunt, the eldest members of our family. The festivities went late, so we stayed at my cousin’s flat. She is now holding the hand of her youngest child and speaking to me in the dark.
Amy’s poem “I Was Somebody’s They and They Were Mine” also appeared in Tikkun.
I was they and they were them.
They is so much simpler than a someone.
They this, they that.
They are looking for a reaction.
They are trying to trigger you.
They could not give a shit if you are alive or dead.
They are butchers.
They were high on opiates.
They cut off her foot, his hand.
They bound them together before they struck the match.
They have made the choice, us or them.
Congrats to Jenise Miller, whose essay “Labor of Memory” appeared in The Kenyon Review.
It wasn’t until my father was in his seventies, just a few years before he passed away, that I learned that his father, a Panama Canal tugboat captain, had once jumped from his boat to rescue someone from drowning in the ocean. Before this, the only stories I had heard about my grandfather were those my father would share, about how he and his brother would find their father at his hangout spot, a local bar, on payday to ask him for money; that their father would shout to the barkeeper, “Hey! Those are my sons. Let them in!” and he would give them money that he did not give their mother; that my father cobbled together how to be a father from his own there-but-not-always-there father. In these stories, my grandfather was rarely a hero.
Kudos to Heather Pegas, whose essay “For Five Trees” appeared in Fatal Flaw.
1. Coastal Redwood
Our friend Karin planted the seedling in the ‘80s, right in the front yard, after her son was born. By the time he was thirty, the redwood had grown to be the most beautiful tree on the block, soaring above and shading half the street. Providing shelter for squirrels and nesting space for mockingbirds. Pushing its giant but shallow roots up under the driveway of the women next door, with whom Karin was perpetually in property disputes.
A shout out to Ashton Cynthia Clarke, whose essay “The Women in Between” appeared in Hypertext.
Recently, I was invited to perform a reading of The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, the book created by Pulitzer Prize-winner Nikole Hannah-Jones as an expansion of the essays presented in the New York Times Magazine. My assigned passage was the history of Celia, an enslaved girl who, at age fourteen, was purchased by a Missouri farmer for sex. After five years of enduring rape and now sick and pregnant with the enslaver’s child, Celia begged him to stop and warned that she would defend herself the next time. When the farmer attacked her yet again, she fought back and ended up killing him.