The Women Who Submit members included in this post published their work in amazing places during January of 2025, and four of our members heard about these opportunities through WWS programming and/or another member. We appreciate everyone’s commitment to sharing and celebrating their work, especially during these difficult times for our beloved Los Angeles. Thank you and happy submitting!
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 members who had their work published this month.
First up, let’s give a congratulations to Michelle Smith whose poem “Morning Decks & Decorum” was published with Four Feathers Press through their Saturday Afternoon Poetry Blogspot series (excerpt available below). She also published a poem entitled “Brightness” in Southern California Shadows with Four Feathers Press.
Fresh cut blades
of green grass stacked
on yards like neighborhood
houses. Awakens my olfactory
senses. Feeling
squishiness of the piled
high hill dancing in spring
coolness between my toes.
Big kudos to Ronna Magy for her publication of poems “Snow Globe” with Silver Birch Press (see excerpt below) and “Free Love” in Dionne’s Story, Volume IV Anthology with Carlow University Press.
between grandmother’s knobby fingers
brown coin-purse
frayed zipper
thread-bare days.
post second war
she counts bus quarters.
rations tickets for coffee sugar butter whole milk
we’re riding Detroit’s Woodward trolley.
downtown electricity
crackling Christmas lines
yellow car clanging
squeals to a stop.
Please give a shoutout to Dilys Wyndham Thomas whose poem “Elegy” was given a Pushcart Prize nomination by journal Rust and Moth, where it initially appeared in their Spring 2024 issue.
You will not appear in obituaries:
cells and the universe colliding,
contracting into an embryo, a whole
half with me since before I was born.
But they said this body could not keep you safe,
so I carved your name into my bones,
swallowed a pill that made a grave of my womb.
Congratulations to Yvette Siegert who translated five poems by Amanda Libertad and fiction piece “The Devil Knows My Name” by Jacinta Escudos from their original Spanish, which both appeared in Fence (the latter of which is shown below).
The Devil tells me everything
He comes to see me every day. He talks a lot. He tells me stories from every country in the world. About how human beings struggle and how they fear Evil, about how they spend their lives making up excuses so that they can give in to temptation and so be on good terms with both God and the Devil.
He tells me that he was once a charming prince, a man of flesh and bone like everyone else. Elegant and intelligent. Handsome. Wonderful. To such an extent that God chose him to become his favorite angel.
“But,” he says, “the problem is that I can’t stand taking orders from anyone.”
Big shoutout to Sibylla Nash who had an essay “It Happened To Me: I Almost Brought Home the Wrong Baby” featured in Another Jane Pratt Thing’s Substack blog.
Please give a congratulations to Marya Summers for publishing her poem “The Congregation” with Pensive Journal in their ninth issue.
Kudos to Ruby Hansen Murray for their poem “White Hair Memorial” which appeared in the Winter 2025 issue of Michigan Quarterly Review. She also published another poem “Devotion” in Elysium Review (see excerpt below).
For years, in the women’s rest room at Dismal Nitch,
a bouquet of wild flowers,
white honeyed verbena, stalks of grass.
How small things stitch the fabric of our lives,
river gray toward shore, the ridge beyond.
Shoutout to Jenise Miller whose article “How The Murals of Elliott Pinkney Captured the Creative Energy of Compton and Beyond” was featured in PBS SoCal.
At schools, churches, art centers, auto shops, health centers, and in neighborhoods, artist Elliott Pinkney painted bold swaths of color and every shade of brown reflected in the community. The murals he designed across Compton in the summers of 1977 and 1978 mirrored the creative energy and consciousness of the city. His art extended into Watts, South Central, Long Beach, Carson, Lynwood, and Berlin, Germany, in over 90* murals across 50 different sites, many of which involved a total of over 200 local youth (*multiple murals painted at one site were counted as individual murals; in a career that spanned over 50 years, this total was likely higher).
Lastly, please give a kudos to Diosa Xochiquetzalcoatl who published a poem entitled “Mojada” with FLUP and Venas Abiertas Editor Popular.
*Feature image credit to Margaret Gallagher*