The Women Who Submit members included in this post published their work in amazing places during January of 2026. Two of our committed members heard about their publication 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. Thank you and happy submitting!
Congratulations to Thea Pueschel whose creative nonfiction piece “Pleasure: Sacred Paint Chips and Memory Fragments” appeared in Flowersong Press’ anthology The White Picket Fence: Stories of Individuality as Rebelliousness Collection.
Kudos to Lisa Eve Cheby whose article “‘Well, we start, not surprisingly, with research:’ Depictions of Guided Inquiry and Critical Information Literacy Instruction in Buffy the Vampire Slayer” was published in Slayage: The International Journal of Buffy+.
From Covid to the current elections, information literacy is often the thin line between our well-being and our endangerment. In 2022, NATO declared the lack of media literacy education a global threat and partnered with the Center for Media Literacy (CML) to host a series of webinars addressing the global crisis of media literacy (Media and Learning Association). Tessa Jolls, president of the Center for Media Literacy, chronicles the history of media literacy and the new urgency for common frameworks and pedagogy to better prepare people in an increasingly decentralized, globalized media landscape. Rather than seeking to rely on social media companies’ accountability, Jolls recommends building media literacy frameworks to guide interventions through education—both formal and informal—of the public in the process-skills needed to understand the content and context of media messages.
Shoutout to Joyce Loh whose poems “Uh-oh” and “Kembangan – a pantoum” (among others) were featured in poems on the mrt. She also published another poem “Lotus Buds – a Sestina” with Frazzled Lit’s fourth issue (excerpt available below).
The tropical heat glows upon the roof.
In the morning light the mother
busies herself before waking the child.
Tiptoeing across the floorboards of wood,
gathering the embers of yesterday’s fire,
adding new coal, noting her beating heart.
The Promised Land, she tells her heart
where they would have a roof
over their head, a kitchen with fire.
She touches her jade bangle, the mother;
arranges the kettle on the wood.
The floor creaks, here comes the child.
Kudos to Audrey Shipp whose memoir piece “How to Eat Grits” appeared in A Gathering Together: Literary Journal.
Life demanded that my sister and I eat weekday breakfasts of cold cereal before school, but we often enjoyed traditional weekend meals that stretched out time ensuring family experience remain in our memory.
On a Saturday morning that didn’t require weekday rushing, Grandmom wore her thin, pale pink house robe with a pajama dress underneath. Her brown legs displayed a sprinkled patchwork of dark moles beneath the robe. Her hair was tied in a rust-colored scarf, darker than her brown skin.
I sat on the kitchen stool and watched as she stood in front of the stove pouring dry grits into a small pot with boiling water. At six years old, my legs didn’t reach the floor. My ten-year-old sister stood nearby in the home we lived in with just Grandmom and our step-grandfather, Hayden.
Congratulations to Gabriella Contratto whose fiction piece “The Floods” was featured in The Tiger Moth Review‘s fifteenth issue.
Until recently, Althea had been a girl who lived by the sea. Her life had been simple, and quite happy. Her father and brother would go fishing every morning in the reef by the village, looking for eels or other delicious fish. Althea would go to the village’s school, and in the afternoon, she and her mother would work in a small shack by the beach, taking the catch and turning it into nilarang. Their nilarang was made with the freshest fish possible and it made their shop one of the most popular on the beach. Locals, after a hard day’s work, would come to the beach to relax and spend time with their family. They would always finish off their day with Althea’s nilarang and praised the family for the tasty dish. American tourists, in their flashy clothes, would giggle over the strange fish in the soup, yet devour it all the same.
But when the typhoon came, the tourists went away. They were unable to fly into the island because the flood waters had risen over the landing strip of the airport. Althea’s father and brother had to stay home and board up the shop as best they could, but the corrugated tin was no match for the howling wind and pounding waves. Their little shop was swept away. The family was disappointed, but it was not the first time that a typhoon had taken from them, and their house further inland had survived better. The family helped their neighbors and began to rebuild the shop, even though the beach had been mostly swept away, and was now seven feet more inland than before.
Shoutout to Azalea Aguilar whose four poems “Sunday Best; Mother Tongue; Late December in DC; You Can Run” appeared in The Mid-Atlantic Review. She also published the poem “Straw Houses” in Yanaguana Volume 1, Issue 1.
I was 8 when she left my father for the last time
One morning I decided to ask about the straws
I’d seen them around before
On top of bookshelves, tucked deep into drawers
Straws cut into smaller pieces
She stumbled through the apartment half awake
Starting her clean of the night before
Counters covered in empty beer bottles, ashtrays overflowing
A couple passed out on our living room floor
What are these?
*Feature image credit to Margaret Gallagher*