The WWS members included in this post published their work in amazing places during June 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.
This is my last post as publication roundup editor. I started as editor in July of 2020, when the pandemic was still in its infancy. Women Who Submit became a lifeline for me with our weekly Zoom check-ins and Writing Alone Together sessions. I’m so grateful to be part of this organization and will miss editing the roundup. I look forward, however, to continuing to read updates about our members’ publishing accomplishments under the editorship of Ariadne Makridakis Arroyo.
Please join me in celebrating our members who published in June of 2024!
Congratulations to Catie Jarvis, whose personal essay Under a Fire Sky: A Creation Myth appeared in Dandelion Revolution Press.
Dear Sky,
Before there was you, there was nothingness. Your nothingness and mine – remnants of that vast emptiness before the beginning of “time.” I was not Mother, and you were not Child. I had lost pieces of my family, my father, and sister, my wholeness. I felt like an orb cycling alone. But the universe swirls with beautiful chaos seeking to organize and cohere. What began 4.6 billion years ago with the formation of our universe, remains in motion. Right now. Within me. And you. Creation. From a single cell. Which became quickly two, and then four. The heat builds. The dust particles and gas collide and explode. I want to tell you the story of our creation, our mythical separation, from one into two.
Congrats also to Noriko Nakada, whose poem “Death Dance” appeared in the Bangalore Review.
Death crawled over me like ants this year.
There were car accidents, illness, and war.
A young girl we knew passed suddenly.
I surrendered as the ants overwhelmed me.
There were car accidents, illness, and war.
Dia de Los Muertos arrived just in time.
I surrendered as the ants overwhelmed me.
Beneath blue skies and papel picado.
Kudos to Hazel Kight Witham, whose memoir-in-verse The Truth About Secrets was published by Strikethrough Press.
It was a gray June morning, but West Hollywood was bursting with rainbows everywhere we looked.
Luminous men aboard flowered floats, short shorts and high-topped boots, chaps and flannel muscle tanks, unbuttoned to bare bright beating hearts to wide open air.
A shout out to Ashunda Norris, whose poem “Black Girl In Search Of God” appeared in Poetry Northwest.
It is our fathers in whom we trust We exit purple wombs & clamor
for their hard, empty gazes We have been taught to unlove ourselves
to bask in the shadow of a man who cannot even give life Our errors
are unique—in that we expected A return on the devotion If we
southern women can’t do nothing else, We can protect a man & his
worship value….