Continue reading “Behind The Editor’s Desk: Vanessa Angélica Villarreal”
By Lauren Eggert-Crowe
Dr. Raina J. León is editor of The Acentos Review, a quarterly literary and arts journal that promotes and publishes Latinx work, and which has featured the work of several Women Who Submit members.
On their website, the review lets writers know, “The Acentos Review publishes poetry, fiction, memoir, interviews, translations, and artwork by emerging and established Latinx writers and artists four times a year. The LatinX community is international and so, too, do we pledge to represent that international community. We welcome submissions in English, Spanish, Portuguese, a combination of two languages, as well as the use of indigenous languages.
“The debate may rage forever as to who or what constitutes Latinx art. Here, there is no such identity crisis. We are already here, writing the histories of our neighborhoods, following the traditions of our ancestors, as well as the poetic traditions that came before us. To paraphrase Baldwin, the poet’s task as historian is to keep the story new, even when the telling is costly. This is the aesthetic we foster at Acentos. It is always about the word, the work, and it all begins here.”
Dr. León is passionate and exuberant about her work as an editor and educator. I asked her some questions about her work at The Acentos Review.
Continue reading “Behind The Editor’s Desk: Dr. Raina J. León”
By Lauren Eggert-Crowe
WWS veteran Melissa Chadburn wants your work.
The Los Angeles literary rock star recently joined the editorial team at DAME Magazine and is looking for reported essays and lyrical journalism. If you’d like to work your Barbara Ehrenreich chops, stretch your Ifill and Didion and Bogado muscles, Melissa wants to work with you. This is not the hasty trendpiece end of the pool, but the deeper dives into research and reporting. You’ll be writing pieces with headlines on par with, “Why don’t doctors take women’s pain seriously?” and “Will SCOTUS let crisis pregnancy centers keep lying?” and “The Deafening Complacency of Melania Trump.”
“Independent, women-owned, and women-edited,” DAME’s tagline is, “For Women Who Know Better.” The outlet values critical analysis in the social, cultural and political spheres, and “breaks through conventional narratives.” Who wouldn’t want their name attached to such a classy, no-bullshit mission statement?
Continue reading “Behind The Editor’s Desk: Melissa Chadburn”
by Lauren Eggert-Crowe
Our main priority at Women Who Submit is uplifting the voices of writers who are historically marginalized in arts and letters. We believe in practicing Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality, which means we look beyond gender discrimination and work for the liberation of women who are at the intersections of various oppressive systems of power, such as white supremacy & anti-Black racism, homophobia, classism, and ableism. We value racial justice and economic justice as an essential part of our mission to center the art and literature of the most underserved and overlooked writers.
That’s why we love journals like Apogee, a beautiful online/print magazine that prioritizes writers of color. From their Mission Statement:
Apogee is a journal of literature and art that engages with identity politics, including but not limited to: race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, and intersectional identities. We are a biannual print publication featuring fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and visual art. Our goals are twofold: to publish fresh work that interrogates the status quo, and to provide a platform for underrepresented voices, prioritizing artists and writers of color.
The word “apogee” denotes the point in an object’s orbit that is farthest from the center. Our mission combines literary aesthetic with political activism. We believe that by elevating underrepresented literary voices we can effect real change: change in readers’ attitudes, change in writers’ positions in literature, and broader change in society.
by Lauren Eggert-Crowe
For the past year and a half, I’ve been interviewing badass women editors for this blog, asking about what they love about their jobs, what they’re looking for in submissions, and how they balance writing and editing. Today I’m going to talk about MY job as editor!
In April of 2016, I signed on as the Reviews Editor at Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built and Natural Environments. I’d known about Terrain for ten years, having gone to grad school with editor in chief Simmons Buntin. I’d long admired Simmons as an editor and a friend, so when we caught up at AWP Los Angeles and he asked if I’d like to be part of the Terrain team, I jumped at the chance!
So, what is Terrain and what do we publish? Continue reading “Behind My Editor’s Desk”
The Nervous Breakdown just got a new fiction editor: writer, photographer and Women Who Submit organizer Rachael Warecki! If you are looking for a place to submit your fiction, consider The Nervous Breakdown, a fun and irreverent blog of essays, stories, poetry, podcasts, and interviews.
While Rachael was spending two weeks at a writing residency at the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods, she took a few minutes to step away from the beautiful view of Santa Cruz to answer some of my questions.
As the new fiction editor at The Nervous Breakdown, tell us what you’re looking for in pieces. How do you hope to make TNB’s fiction section stand out?
For our original fiction section, I’m looking for short literary fiction from authors of many different backgrounds, featuring characters who have traditionally been underrepresented in literature. I’m new to TNB and our fiction section has only been open to original fiction for a short time, but I previously served as a fiction editor at another literary magazine, and I can say that in my year and a half at that journal, we never had a shortage of submissions from men. And I’m starting to see that a little bit here at TNB: men don’t need to be encouraged to submit their work, because they’re already doing so. Continue reading “Behind the Editor’s Desk: Rachael Warecki”
By Lauren Eggert-Crowe
Are you a witch?
Do you have a dark, strange story or poem looking for a home?
Are you drawn to the magical, the mysterious, the occult?
Then it’s time to start reading and submitting to Luna Luna. Founded four years ago by Lisa Marie Basile, Luna Luna is a delightfully witchy feminist journal dedicated to all things occult, poetic, and otherworldly. At Luna Luna you’ll find everything from a personal essay on Mexican White Magic to a Berry Lip Stain Spell for Confidence to a rundown of movies about BDSM to directions on how to sew a poppet. The mixture of essays and magickal ephemera is beautiful.
I asked some questions of Managing Editor Joanna C. Valente. Continue reading “Behind the Editor’s Desk: Joanna C. Valente”
by Lauren Eggert-Crowe
In a current cultural moment saturated with blogs dedicated to all things childrearing, it can be nonetheless difficult for some mothers to find the answers and community they are looking for. There are still constrictive stereotypes about what a “regular mom” looks and acts like: white, middle-class, straight. Women who don’t look like they just walked off the set of a dish detergent commercial often get shut out of the conversation. On top of that, the creative knowledge production around parenting and family-building still gets devalued in comparison to other, supposedly more urgent topics, because it is most often women who are producing this knowledge and pushing the conversation forward.
Enter, Raising Mothers, an online magazine “for mothers by mother writers, publishing personal essays, in-depth interviews and creative writing, honoring both parenting and personhood.” Raising Mothers “actively seeks out and supports work by and about those often marginalized in the literary conversation, including people of color and gender non-conformists, and members of the LGBTQIA and differently abled communities.”
If you are a mother searching for a community that sees you and wants to lift you up, Raising Mothers wants to hear your story. Continue reading “Behind The Editor’s Desk: Sherisa de Groot”
by Lauren Eggert-Crowe
Even though I’ve never been published there (yet), I feel a certain kinship with DUM DUM Zine. It came into existence the same year I moved to L.A., 2011. I spent ten years of my youth making handmade zines about poetry and politics, so I’m drawn to anything with ‘zine’ in the title. It features interviews with some of the first writers who I was introduced to in the early disorienting days of searching for my footing in a new metropolis: Kate Durbin, J. Ryan Stradal, Zoe Ruiz, Yumi Sakugawa. A sidebar link list displays Los Angeles fixtures like Skylight Books, Otherwild, and Stories.
DUM DUM is an online zine of poetry, prose, and uncategorizeable ephemera, calling out to the avant garde, the hybrid writers, the genre-melting artists among us who need an outlet that celebrates weirdness. They accept submissions on a rolling basis for their e-zine, and publish a print issue yearly. Don’t expect a traditional format; DUM DUM’s previous tangible productions have included a music/poetry CD in a handmade envelope, a cardboard box, and an accordion-folded chapbook.
I asked some questions of Taleen Kali, the artist/writer/yoga instructor/musician/editor-in-chief and founder of DUM DUM. Continue reading “Behind The Editor’s Desk: Taleen Kali”
by Lauren Eggert-Crowe
Early in 2017, Women Who Submit invited Nikia Chaney to one of our submission parties. It was the beginning of the year, so the room was packed with writers excited and motivated to accomplish their goals and renew their commitments to good work. We hung posterboard on the wall with goals like “Submit to Residencies,” “Get Paid For Work,” “Finish a Project,” and “Activist Writing.” We each scrawled our names in marker underneath the goals that spoke to us. Still buzzing from the spirit of the Women’s March and the inspiration of powerful intersectional feminist leaders, many of us were eager to connect our creative work to community building. Nikia Chaney, of Jamii Publishing, led new and seasoned WWS members in a great discussion about starting collaborative projects like a press or a journal, and how to best involve the community in the artistic process.
It’s safe to say Nikia knows a lot about goal setting. Jamii, an independent press based in San Bernardino, beautifully lays out its vision, mission, and goal: “Our mission at Jamii Publishing is to foster the communion of artists from all genres, foster growth in the artistic world, and to bring these arts to the community. We strive to work with artists who are already active in the community as well as those who have a desire to reach outside of their comfort zone and share their art with the larger world. We want to gift books to these dedicated people and help them in turn help others.”
