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*