The Women Who Submit members included in this post published their work in amazing places during July of 2025. One of our committed members heard about an opportunity 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 some time to celebrate yourself and your wonderful accomplishments this summer. Thank you and happy submitting!
Congratulations to Christine Heriat who published a short story entitled “The Secret Fishing Spot” in Made in L.A. Vol. 6: Hollywood Adjacent.
Kudos to Lois P. Jones who published the poem “Epistolary to Frida’s Sister Rose” in Image Journal.
Dear Rose,
From his balcony, the night sky is a portal to a pinhole
of other lives—some barely visible. As if what is remembered grows
far away. This is the way life is: You are always here on hard soil
and what you want is north or south of you. Sometimes I think death
is a sky so black we leave all our lives behind.
Shoutout to Mary Camarillo who wrote a book review entitled “Locals Only, The Golden Women of Orange County” in Citric Acid of Women in a Gold State: California Poets at 60 and Beyond, an anthology collection which features many WWS members’ work.
I’ve been an Orange County woman since 1966 when I was fourteen and my father’s aerospace job transferred him to Santa Monica from Charlotte, North Carolina. The Beach Boys sang about “California Girls” on the radio as we drove across the country. I couldn’t wait to be one, but when we settled in Fountain Valley, California, I realized I didn’t quite fit the profile. I wasn’t blond, my skin never tanned, and I wasn’t allowed to wear a French bikini.
I’ve never felt like a true California girl, but almost sixty years later, California is still my home. And now, as “a woman of a certain age in youth-obsessed California,” I’m delighted to be included in a new anthology from Gunpowder Press, Women in a Golden State, California Poets at 60 and Beyond.
Congratulations to Tanya Ward Goodman whose blog post “A Living Artifact: Remembrances from Tanya Ward Goodman” appeared in SPACES.
It was boiling hot in Simi Valley on the day I first visited Bottle Village. I was not yet twelve years old and wore cotton, shortie pajamas, the only clothes that didn’t scrape like sandpaper against the sunburn I’d acquired the day before at Will Rogers State Beach. For close to ten days, we’d been travelling the back roads from Albuquerque, New Mexico to the Golden State with dad at the wheel of a brown Chevy pick-up he’d dubbed “Daedalus.” My grandmother, Rose, rode shotgun, and, in the back, under the camper shell, me, my brother, and our three best friends from school nestled in sleeping bags, loose as popcorn. We’d been to Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm, but Dad was never content with only the main tourist spots. He ballpoint tattooed the pages of his Rand McNally road atlas with alternate routes, and drew stars to mark roadside attractions, artists’ homes, and miscellaneous wonders.
Kudos to Luivette Resto who published the poem “A Mother Is Like an Archipelago” in the 2025 issue of the Latino Book Review.
Puerto Rico is not an island.
Despite what has been said
she does not stand alone.
She is an archipelago,
an arm’s length away from smaller islands
–Culebra, Vieques, Mona.
Greeted by hands clapping
as the wheels touch the tarmac
and the sign of the cross gesticulated by abuelitas
I tell my children on our first family visit:
a mother is like an archipelago.
Please also join me in congratulating Jesenia Chávez whose memoir piece “Move-In Day” also appeared in the same issue of Latino Book Review.
Move-in day at UC Santa Barbara in the fall of 1998 was quick. We packed up my mom’s gray dodge van. My older sister would drive, my things were in the back and some girls from Latinas Guiding Latinas de UCLA would join us. My stuff fit in a couple cardboard boxes, and we had plenty of room. I would never again have such little stuff to move and pack.
Mom and dad could not come, it was only my sister, like always she was taking care of me. My parents had to hustle and work. But I had my sisters, so that comforted me.
Shoutout to M. Anne Kala’i whose poem “Emancipation” appeared in Hawai’i Pacific Review.
I.
Mother didn’t teach me how to garden.
She taught me to pack up a house
after the water turned off,
then the lights.
Well-labeled boxes swallowed
our things and spit out
new cities. I learned you can change
your heart and name
after a hand in marriage
and divorce, marriage
and divorce.
I can’t fix cars or build shelves
and I’ve never been able to save money,
but I run like her
and I always get away.
Kudos to Stephanie Abraham whose op-ed “Finding Courage During Challenging Times” was featured in PRsay.
In a blog post published last month, PRSA’s Los Angeles Chapter President Marisol Barrios Perez, APR, wrote, “I urge our PR community to do what we do best: Raise our voices. Because when we speak together — with purpose, with clarity and with courage — we shape the narrative. And we stand on the right side of history.”
Indeed, these are unprecedented times that call for unprecedented measures. Just a glimpse at the last six months in Los Angeles, where I live, is telling. January started with the deadliest and most destructive wildfires in the state’s history. In early June, the president sent the National Guard and Marines to our streets, exchanging insults and accusations with California Gov. Newsom in the process. With a softening job market, an uncertain economy and a fragile geopolitical climate, it’s enough to make you want to hide under the covers and wait for calmer days.
Shoutout to Mahru Elahi whose creative nonfiction piece “Summoning” was picked up by Multiplicity Magazine.
In my dreams, I am dressed in loose clothing and rise into the air with only a thought, guided by the warmth in my belly. Usually it is night, but sometimes the sun is out. I am alone and curious, and propel myself high above the landscape, delighting in the patterned streets and rolling hills, the geometry of buildings. When I wake from these dreams, the feeling in my belly is a reminder of where I’ve gone. I replay gauzy snatches of dream-memory throughout the day, the lightness that filled me. I want to return, to live again suspended above the earth.
I have always had dreams of flight. They come less often the older I get, and I am missing something from their absence.
Congratulations to Monica Cure who published a poem entitled “A Reading of the Seagull” in Volume 119 of Poet Lore.
Kudos to Sophie Hamel whose fiction piece “The Pythia” was featured in The Plentitudes.
From the stone bleachers of Delphi’s ancient theater, the view of the Parnassus mountains had a before-civilization-turned-everything-ugly charm we all wanted a slice of. We took pictures, crowding the frame with our friends and defiant smiles.
The cultural field trip had so far taken us from one half-column to the next with the regularity of burning sunshine. Today, we were blessed with a mostly intact theater. Unfortunately, it was about to be a stage once again. We shifted in our seats as Mrs. Perlotti marched to the orchestra’s center.
“Quiet,” she said, the word harnessing power as it glided up to the seats Justine and I had claimed. “One of you will read a poem to the rest of the class, who will li-sten,” she over-articulated as if the concept couldn’t be grasped by our still-growing teenager brains.
Big shoutout to Diana Radovan who published a poetry collection entitled Seasons of Change with Outpost Press.
And lastly, congratulations to Ariadne Makridakis Arroyo whose creative nonfiction piece entitled “Trying on Womanhood for Size: It’s She AND They” appeared in 826LA’s Along The Way, We Saw The World: A 20th Anniversary Collection of Prose and Poetry.
*Feature image credit to Margaret Gallagher*