Happy spring and post-AWP festivities! I greatly enjoyed building community and connecting with so many of you at AWP. It is my honor and pleasure to present this publication roundup featuring so many wonderful writers. The Women Who Submit members included in this post published their work in amazing places during March 2025. One member heard about an opportunity through WWS programming and/or another member. Thank you and happy submitting!
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 a moment to extend congratulations to our members who had their work published this month.
Let’s begin by congratulating Danielle Lauren for her fiction piece “Mya Ditches School” being published in Funny Pearls.
‘Mr. Sinclair, get to class.’
I still remember Mr. Anderson’s voice that day. High-pitched and dripping with impatience. Uptown rolled his eyes so hard I thought they might stick. I nudged Uptown and he fixed his face before turning around.
‘My bad, Mr. Anderson, we was just trying to find my math book.’
‘And what does your math book have to do with Ms. Monroe?’ Mr. Anderson said.
Big kudos to Donna Spruijt-Metz who published her book entitled To Phrase a Prayer for Peace with Wildhouse Publishing.
Shoutout to Amy Raasch whose poem “Blue Star Coffee” was featured in Rose Books Reader – Volume 1.
Congratulations to Sara Ellen Fowler whose poem “Good Mare” appeared in Poetry Daily.
That I was
your simple bit
a bride of pressure and prayer you ground
grinding down
The one who taps your teeth to get you to open
—to be led be led
Shoutout to Anais Godard who published a creative nonfiction piece “How to Cremate your Pet Squirrel” with The Letter Review, which won their prize for nonfiction.
Albert was no ordinary squirrel; he was more like a surrogate child to me, a hairy one who didn’t require a college fund. I had found him at a particularly dark time, right after my first miscarriage and long before the twins came along, at the foot of a giant sequoia. A tiny, shivering ball of fur that looked more like a discarded fetus than a woodland critter. It was love at first sight.
Kudos to Melissa Chadburn whose hybrid feature “Not Monsters: On Las Azules and Structural Critique” appeared in ASAP/Review.
Apple TV+’s Spanish language series Las Azules (Women in Blue) is set in 1971 and depicts Mexico City’s first female police force.1 It’s stunning to look at with the delightful ‘70s wardrobe, the vintage-inspired color intensity, the midcentury architecture. Las Azules shares the aesthetic of crónica roja, a Latin American branch of contemporary literary journalism. Narratives with blood running through it. The red chronicle searches for ways to express the despair and political frustration of the time, the grittier side of documentarian work. But where Las Azules really shines is in how it moves beyond prior genres and narrative tropes in its interrogation of intergenerational cycles of violence, how it tries to provide an account of violence against women that is neither sentimental nor noir, but something more like analysis.
Congratulations to Diosa Xochiquetzalcóatl who published a poem “En una ocasión/On One Occasion” in the 2024-2025 San Diego Poetry Annual: Bilingual Edition.
Kudos to .CHISARAOKWU. whose creative nonfiction piece “A Brief History of Pain” was featured in midnight & indigo.
My origin story begins with pain, or, at the very least, an attempt to avoid it. I was born by cesarean, the doctor believing my size too painful for my mother to push through. Since then, I’ve lived to avoid pain—no diving into a lake or pool for fear I’d hit the bottom and break both legs, quitting volleyball because the ball jammed my piano-playing fingers, staying away from action films because every punch or crash would send intense pain sensations through my body. Avoiding pain was a preoccupation; not wanting to cause pain or discomfort to anyone became a skill.
Shoutout to Jay O’Shea who published a fiction piece entitled “An Unchanged History” with 96th of October: Tales of the Extraordinary.
It doesn’t trouble me when my mother forgets my name. She’s 83 and has been in the nursing home for months. A battery of health problems brought her in, but cognitive decline was right up there. The doctors recently switched to calling it dementia.
Her face brightens when I arrive. Then comes a stumble: she calls me Leslie, the name of a cousin long dead. A terrified look crosses her face.
“Lorna,” I offer.
She bounces back, diving into a story I’ve heard dozens of times about a road trip we took when I was in fourth grade, about the locks on the Erie Canal and how I turned cartwheels on the dock. That’s not that odd. Old people live in the past. The rest of us live in the future. The present is where none of us want to be.
Big congratulations to Andy Anderegg whose fiction book entitled “Plum” was published with Hub City Writers Project.
Big shoutout to Michelle Smith whose poem “Escalate & Elevate” was published by Four Feathers Press. Her other poem “There’s a Sunflower” was also chosen as their print poetry awards nominee.
*Feature image credit to Margaret Gallagher*
