Women Who Submit

The Women Who Submit members included in this post published their work in amazing places during June of 2025. Three 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. Thank you and happy submitting!

Congratulations to Michelle Y Smith who had poems “Click & Strike,” “The April of My Life,” and “The Act of Selfies” published in Four Feathers Press Online Edition: Stone Worlds, as well as the poems “He’s Not My President,” “Time Magazine April 30,” and “World Flux” published in Poetry for the People. Except for the latter is available below:

Art makes the world go round, 

At his ECF artecf.org, there’s

a kaleidoscope of materials

Chris enjoys to crochet 

and paint. He too is a ceramist

freely his creations take shape. 

Food, flowers, and folks. 

Art is essential and 

is home sweet home. 

Poetry and prose writer is me.

Seasons, seashells, life experience 

takes me. With a stroke of a pen,

I am free.

Big kudos to Amy Raasch whose manuscript (which included the piece “Why I Am Not a Gravedigger”) was picked as a finalist for the 2025 Jack McCarthy Prize for Write Bloody Publishing‘s manuscript contest. Catch a glimpse of the manuscript sample here.

Let’s give a shoutout to Anais Godard whose fiction piece “The Clay of It” appeared in fractured lit.

When he walked into her studio, Elodie was sculpting her seventh ceramic penis of the week. This one had antlers.

She didn’t look up. “Custom or classic?”

The man hesitated. He was tall, with nervous shoulders and a brown paper envelope clutched like it contained his last will and testament. “Custom,” he said.

She glanced at him, a quick, assessing look. No sleazy grin, no too-wide eyes pretending not to scan her overalls. His posture said apology. She’d learned to read them, over the years: the oglers, the moaners, the “accidental” touchers. Men who claimed it was about art but watched her work like they were waiting for a lap dance. This one wasn’t like that. This one was here for something else. Something he almost didn’t want to ask for.

Congratulations to Romaine Washington whose poem “Cannibals and Treatises” was featured in The Coachella Review.

how we can slice a human mind in two
while the skull is intact. lying
in the most conspicuous places,

white crime usually dresses in business suits
and we mistake them for flesh and blood men.
as though words create new realities,

Zelenskyy, I have my popcorn
ready to hear you wax eloquent.

i witness you running with adrenaline chiseling
a new rib in your chest. you think you see
a porch light on, hear a tv commercial cooing

Kudos to Mahru Elahi who published a hybrid piece entitled “The Fuel of Nations: a Cold War Girlhood in Iranian America” in Issue 10.1 of Foglifter. They also had a creative nonfiction piece entitled “American Breakfast | صبحا” featured in Lambda Literary’s 2024 Emerge Anthology.

Shoutout to Heather Pegas whose poem “And Then It Died” appeared in Heavy Feather Review and her fiction piece “A Study of Sophie-Claude Clement (1841-1914)” was published in the Thieving Magpie’s thirtieth issue. Excerpt of the latter is available below:

“But why would I wash only my legs?” I asked the artist. “Am I a shepherdess, a barefoot shepherdess? So that my feet got dirty, and I splashed mud up and down my calves, with some dung as well? And as we live in Paris, how am I meant to have come across this sheep dung, and am I to bathe my legs in a street puddle, or in the Seine? I mean to say is this not a ridiculous pose to be striking? To be concentrating so intently on cleaning my legs and only my legs?”

At this, the artist began to hop about!

*Feature image credit to Margaret Gallagher*

The Women Who Submit members included in this post published their work in amazing places during May of 2025. Eight 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. We have so many wonderful members featured in this month’s publication roundup, so please take a moment to extend gratitude to one another! Thank you and happy submitting!

Let’s begin by congratulating Dilys Wyndham Thomas whose poem “weather warning” was published in Issue 57 of Beyond Words Magazine.

Kudos to Sharon Langley who published her poem “I Saw My Mom Today” in the poetry anthology Women in a Golden State: California Poets at 60 and Beyond by Gunpowder Press.

Congratulations to Mary Camarillo whose fiction piece “Flip Flop” also appeared in Women in a Golden State: California Poets at 60 and Beyond.

Shoutout to Laura Sturza whose creative nonfiction piece “I Never Want to Leave These People, This Place” was featured in Issue 32 of Santa Fe Writers Project Journal.

Los Angeles felt more like home than my suburban Maryland hometown. Every corner of the city on the edge of the Pacific was interconnected—dots on a map linking people and places that brought joy and grace into my life. There was the drab, crowded newsroom where I filed my first stories as a newly minted city hall reporter, anxious about whether I had gotten the facts right. There was the noisy restaurant where my future husband Tom and I had our first date and were thrilled we both looked like the photos in our dating profiles. It also had sites where my heart was broken—the workplace with the angry boss, and the second-floor apartment where my lovely neighbor and I swapped cat-care duties when we traveled, at least until my lush, long-haired Calico passed away.

Congratulations to Romaine Washington who published poem “Café con Libros y Corazon” with Dim Lights & Obsidian Tongues: A Pomona Poetry Anthology and El Martillo Press. She also published poem “And Then Tomorrow” in Cholla Needles: Soft Power Edition.

Kudos to Melinda Palacio whose two poems “Sunrise” and “Good Girls Don’t Wear Red Panties” was featured in Santa Barbara Independent Magazine. Excerpt of the latter is available below:

Voices ebb and flow
Hello? Mom?
Nurse?

Sweat puddles
into a damp swamp
of twisted sheets

Harnessed by machines
Fluids drip, drop, 
bloody crook of arm

Free me 
from this web
Please

Huge shoutout to Didi Anofienem who published fiction novel Essien of Alkebulan: Wielders of Floods and Flames with Turner Publishing Company.

Congratulations to Tisha Marie Reichl-Aguilera whose fiction piece “Open Mind” appeared in Flowersong Press’ anthology The White Picket Fence: Stories of Individuality as Rebelliousness.

Kudos to Anais Godard whose article “An Open Letter to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Who Thinks My Daughter Is a Tragedy” was featured in McSweeney’s Open Letter To People or Entities Who Are Unlikely to Respond.

Dear Mr. RFK Jr.,
(The “dear” is tradition. Don’t mistake it for affection.)

You said autistic children are a burden. That they ruin families. That they’ll never pay taxes or write poems. That they are, in essence, collateral damage.

I’d like to introduce you to my daughter.

She is five. She does not speak in sentences yet, but she knows how to answer a joke with a smirk. She organizes her markers by color, then chaos, then color again. She plays baseball without rules, which is probably the right way to play it. She hums when she’s thinking. She hums a lot.

When another child’s upset—before the adults notice, before the child even cries—she takes their hand. She leans her forehead against theirs, gently, like she’s checking for a fever only she can feel.

Shoutout to Jesenia Chavez who published creative nonfiction essay “My Favorite Mother’s Day” with Mobile Data Mag.

It was a hot day in LA, we arrived and then we got a wheelchair for my grandmother. We walked around the gardens. I remember I wore the wrong shoes because they had a small heel that kept digging into the grass. We took turns pushing my grandmother’s wheelchair. When it was my turn, I was terrified of rolling my grandma down a hill and accidentally letting go. It was funny because the gardens are not too wheelchair friendly, but we managed. I was sweating a lot while it was my turn to push. We all took turns. My older sister Erika pushed the most because she is the toughest and complains the least.

Congratulations to Heather Pegas whose fiction piece entitled “Gem of My Eye” appeared in Issue 9 of Heimat Review.

A man lurched out at me on the street. I had been making my way down the busy sidewalk between the gym and the post office, almost late for a doctor’s appointment. In my haste and in that crowd, the man should not have stood out to me, but he did, even before he stepped into my path.

The man was skinny. He had a Roman nose, a head of black curly hair, and he’d been scanning passersby with an agitated air, as if he might jump out of his skin. He seemed young to me, perhaps thirty, not much more.

Naturally, I recoiled to find him right in front of me, but quickly recovered. In my city, in broad daylight, no one ever stopped you but for two reasons—cash or directions. I felt unwell, my money was for my doctor, and I didn’t have time for any lost soul. But I noticed the man had pressed trousers, a good dress shirt. He probably didn’t need my money, so I put his agitation down to being lost.

Kudos to Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo who published a poem entitled “The Story of the Othermother” with Santa Fe Writers Project Journal, as well as creative nonfiction piece “So You Don’t Like to Read” in Boundless 2025: The Anthology of the Rio Grande Valley International Poetry Festival with Flowersong Press. See excerpt of the former below:

I Love Lucy fantasies planted from the TV
and into her mind on sick days home from school.
So far back buried the seed of a husband
she was to reach for with twinkles in her eyes
before saying, “Ricky, Darling.”

She believed in what would grow between them
and the culture they’d carefully collect like items for a nest–
drums and poetry, dance and gratitude.

But no husband sprouted.

Shoutout to Jasmine Vallejo-Love who published six poems “Existential Crisis,” “A Gentle Push to Persevere,” “Butterfly Cinquain for a Burning LA,” “Sole Breadwinner,” “Cerulean Heart,” and “For the Puerto Rican Serviceman Who Lost Their Lives in the Aftermath of 9/11” in Cholla Needles: Soft Power Edition.

Congratulations to .CHISARAOKWU. whose poems “Sleep-Wake Cycle” and “Fancy” were featured in Anomaly. See excerpt of the former below:

In sleep, I hold catastrophe at bay;
awake, the fat arm of an aunt
and an uncle’s mustard breath
press against my softest parts—
This wreck: persistent, recurring
brain on loop, glitch in the algorithm,

Kudos to Flint whose poem “The Trouble with Double Vision” was picked up by Quartet Journal.

My eyes are in my mouth
in between my teeth

and my tongue glosses
over them as truthfully

as vodka dresses the ice
in the highball sulking
 
its way down my throat.
Throat wide as hunger

Shoutout to Ronna Magy whose five poems “Afternoon Prayer,” “Like a Virgin, “Knives, Forks, Spoons, Mothers, Children,” “Grandmother,” and “What Kind of Times?” appeared in Cholla Needles: Soft Power Edition. She also published “Women in a Golden State” in Women in a Golden State: California Poets at 60 and Beyond by Gunpowder Press.

Congratulations to Elizabeth Galoozis who published blog post “Shaping a Collection into a Book” with awpwriter.org.

When I was matched in the Writer to Writer program in 2022, I’d been trying to compile a poetry collection for a few years. “Compile” is really the right word. The manuscript I brought to my mentor, Claire Wahmanholm, was more of a portfolio, in which I tried to faithfully represent the last twenty years of my poetic development. Intellectually, I understood that other poetry collections weren’t comprehensive or documentary. But emotionally, it was difficult for me to chart a middle path between the comprehensive and the tightly themed (books like Brittney Corrigan’s Daughters or Terrance Hayes’s American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin). I knew the latter model wouldn’t work for what I had, and at almost forty, I wanted to work with what I had.

And lastly, kudos to Sakae Manning for their hybrid piece “My Grandmother’s Affair with the San Andreas Fault” being featured in Driftwood‘s 2025 Anthology.

*Feature image credit to Margaret Gallagher*