Tag: California Arts Council

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Cheers to 2019!

three women of color holding beers and standing in front of a graphic black and white mural

Dearest Writers,

As we come to the end of another year (and decade), I like to look back at all we’ve accomplished this year, and congratulate everyone for continuing to thrive when too many want us to disappear.

Firsts the firsts. The Kit Reed Travel Fund, thanks to a donation from Kit Reed’s surviving family members, made it possible for WWS to sponsor three writers of color to attend a workshop, residency, or conference of their choice with a small $340 grant meant to offset travel costs. In the spirit of Kit Reed’s prolific work and adventurous spirit, Sakae Manning attended the Summer Fishtrap Gathering of Writers in Oregon, Grace Lee attended Bread Loaf Writers Conference in Vermont, and Sibylla Nash attended Joya: AiR in Spain. We look forward to offering more grants in 2020.

Thanks to the tireless work of managing editors, Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera and Rachael Warecki, we had our first anthology, ACCOLADES, made it through it’s open call, selection process, and design, and will be ready for release in spring 2020. ACCOLADES was made possible by CCI Arts Investing in Tomorrow grant and is a celebration of our writers’ publications and awards over the last few years.

Another first in 2019 was our WWS Happy Hour at AWP hosted by our friends at Nucleus Portland where we featured 10 readers to a jovial crowd drinking beer and wine. Be sure to be on the look out for our 2020 AWP event, the ACCOLADES, a WWS Anthologly, Release Party on March 5th at La Botanica from 4pm-7pm .

We ended the year strong with one last first, our first crowd funding campaign, and thanks to the work and leadership of Lauren Eggert-Crowe and Ashley Perez we surpassed our funding goal! These funds were needed to match funds from a CAC Local Impact grant we received in 2019.

In 2019 we also hosted the following workshops and panels:

February: You Need a Website! A Practical Guide to the What, Why, and How of Building (or Strategically Updating) Your Author Website with Li Yun Alvarado

April: Poetry Submission Panel with Muriel Leung & Vickie Vertiz and moderated by Lauren Eggert-Crowe

June: Finding an Agent and What I Never Knew Until It Happened with Natashia Deón

August: Tier One Submission Strategies with Désirée Zamorano

October: Pay attention: attending and collaborating at the end slash beginning of the world with Rachel McLeod Kaminer and Rocío Carlos

But let’s not forget other highlights such a the 6th Annual Submission Blitz in September, where we encouraged our members to submit to tier one journals, an action inspired by Vida and the Vida count. We also made our 4th appearance at Lit Crawl LA, with “It’s a Book Party!” featuring new titles from members Jenise Miller, Carla Sameth, Colette Sartor, Micelle Brittan Rosado, and Noriko Nakada, and we featured at the Los Angeles reading series, Roar Shack, hosted by David Rocklin with readers Sakae Manning, Grace Lee, Sibylla Nash, Ryane Granados, Lituo Huang, Andy Anderegg, and Ann Faison.

And last but not least we can’t forget the 125 publications and awards celebrated on the WWS Publication Round Up in 2019, a list curated each month by the brilliant and tireless, Laura K. Warrell.

So with that, I thank you for all you did this year. I thank you for sharing space with me, and for continuing to champion your work and the work of other writers in our community. We do this together, and I look forward to another year of submission parties and publications with you!

Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, Director of Women Who Submit

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Building Our Community

A woman standing before a room of women writers speaking.

By Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo

Let me begin by saying that we currently have an IndieGoGo Campaign to raise funds for our 2020 programming. Please consider donating and help us fight for gender parity in publishing. For those new to WWS, allow me to share some of our history and how we’ve arrived at our first ever fundraising drive.

In June 2011, Alyss Dixson and Ashaki M. Jackson invited me to help plan and host our first submission party. Our mission was to empower women writers to submit to journals in hopes of changing the gender disparity recorded by the first Vida Count. At this first party, I made quiche to share, we created a lending library of journals, and we set up a moving office with printer, paper, envelopes, and stamps. About six women met that day to set goals and submit work. Every time a person submitted the room cheered. With the exception of the moving office (since most journals now accept online submissions), these details have become the essential characteristics of any Women Who Submit event.

Over the years we continued to meet. One year we met about an average of once a season, and at one meeting we only had three participants, but we never stopped meeting.

In the summer of 2014, Writ Large Press launched their first #90for90 series, where they hosted 90 literary events in 90 days. Excited by the series, I reached out to then WLP partner, Jessica Ceballos and asked if there was room for a Women Who Submit event. She said yes, and we decided to host a panel on publishing a first book called “It’s a Book!” with author of Remedy for a Broken Angel, Toni Ann Johnson, author of Codeswitch: Fires from Mi Corazón, Iris de Anda, author of Harrowgate, Kate Maruyama, author of Spent, Antonia Crane, and hosted by Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera. This was our first official public event.

That same summer Tisha, Ashaki, Ramona Gonzales, and myself got together to write our first grant proposal. We had several meetings where we parsed out duties and fined-tuned our narrative. In that grant we proposed a professional development workshop series. We weren’t awarded the grant, but since we’d done the work to create the program, we decided to move forward with implementing it.

In 2016 I invited small group of writers to create a leadership team, along with those already involved to help manage our growing community.

Over the last few years we’ve had workshops on contest strategies, mothering and writing, building a website, finding an agent, self-care, applying to workshops, residencies and fellowships, writing an essay, and so forth. We went from hosting events at different literary and cultural spaces around Los Angeles to now having an ongoing residency at the Exposition Park Regional Library, thanks to literary community advocate and librarian Eugene Owens. And we’ve presented at AWP, Binder Con, Lambda Lit Fest, Macondo Writers Workshop, among others.

In 2017 we were awarded our first programming grant from CCI Arts, which allowed us to make our workshops a regular bimonthly event, pay our guest speakers, gift small grants to our members to offset submission fees, livestream workshops for accessibility, and publish our first anthology (to be released at AWP 2020).

In 2019, thanks to a generous donation from Kit Reed’s family, we were able to offer three writers travel grants to attend writing workshops out of state, and we were awarded our second grant, a matching Local Impact grant from the California Arts Council.

To have this community continue we need your help! All this programming is offered for free, and it’s part of our mission to continue to offer impactful resources to women and non-binary writers for free, but it’s not free to build and manage.

Check out our IndieGoGo campaign, and help us empower writers submit and fight for gender parity in publishing.