March 2022 is ending here in Los Angeles with both rain and sunshine, which feels like a hopeful sign. Another hopeful sign: our WWS members are, as always, consistently sending out their work and publishing in fantastic markets.
I’ve included an excerpt from published pieces (if available) or a blurb if the publication is a book, and a link (if available) to where the pieces can be purchased and/or read in their entirety.
Please join me in celebrating our members who published in March!
It’s Halloween, which signals October’s close, and our WWS members continue to send out their work and publish in amazing places.
This month we’re celebrating the WWS members whose work was published during October of 2021. I’ve included an excerpt from their published pieces (if available) or a blurb if the publication is a book, and a link (if available) to where the pieces can be purchased and/or read in their entirety.
Please join me in celebrating our members who published in October!
September has ended, bringing us even closer to the end of 2021, a year that has felt as unreal, uneasy, and unresolved as 2020. Yet our WWS members continue to send out their work and publish in amazing places.
This month we’re celebrating the WWS members whose work was published during September of 2021. I’ve included an excerpt from their published pieces (if available) or a blurb if the publication is a book, and a link (if available) to where the pieces can be purchased and/or read in their entirety.
Let’s celebrate our members who published in September!
It’s the end of August and the heat is kicking in here in Southern California, with more hot weather through at least September, if not longer. But the heat isn’t slowing down our WWS members, who continue to send out their fabulous work and publish it.
This month we’re celebrating the WWS members whose work was published during August 2021. I’ve included an excerpt from their published pieces (if available) or a blurb if the publication is a book, and a link (if available) to where the pieces can be purchased and/or read in their entirety.
Let’s celebrate our members who published in August!
This year started off with tumultuous national events, but as January ends, hope shimmers in the air. With that shimmer in mind, let’s celebrate the accomplishments of our amazing membership. Despite tough times, the members of Women Who Submit have kept sending out their work and getting it published.
Congratulations to everyone who published this month!
Another round of incredible publications by our membership. Each month when I put together this post, I’m awed by the determination, talent, and perseverance of every one of us who gets our words out into the world. So congratulations to the following WWS members who published work during the month of October!
I’m heading to AWP again this year. Last year was my first because I had the chance to table for Jack Jones Literary Arts. I also listened in on panels, heard from writers I respect and admire, and tackled that book fair.
The book fair is so
overwhelming. All of those presses and programs and tables and books and
writers. You could run into Jericho Brown wearing a flower crown, or Terese
Marie Mailhot signing her memoir, or Wendy Ortiz browsing. In that overwhelm
that is the AWP Book Fair, I was star-struck, and buying too many books, and
stuck in my head as I wandered the aisles. I saw presses I’d sent work to who
had passed. There were presses I’d never heard of. There were presses who’d
published me. What did I have to say at these tables where my words were or
were not welcome?
I felt lost, and small, so
I found my way back to the Jack Jones table again and again. I only tabled
there for a few hours over the course of the conference, but it was always a
magnet pulling me, and it felt like my home base within that chaos. Even when I
wasn’t tabling for them, every time I found myself in that fair, I’d walk by
their table, visit with the staff or an author, ask if they needed anything,
and help out before making my way to a lecture or panel.
Jack Jones isn’t at AWP
this year, but I want to tackle that book fair in a way that feels healthy and
productive. I don’t want to feel so lost and overwhelmed. So this is my AWP
Book Fair action, and I invite any Women Who Submit members who are attending
to join me in putting a little activism into your book fair wanderings.
1) Approach a press with one of our Women Who Submit postcards.
2) Present the card and
introduce yourself. Explain a little about Women Who Submit, an organization which,
as a response to the VIDA count, empowers women and nonbinary writers to submit
their work for publication.
3) Choose your own
adventure:
a friendly press: Thank the presses for doing their part to bring more gender equity into the publishing world. Maybe ask how they think they will do on the 2019 count, and what they plan to do to ensure continued equity in 2020. Ask about how they think they’re doing publishing women of color.
a press that is making gains: Acknowledge that the press has improved, but isn’t yet equitable. Ask if they are doing anything to ensure more equitable gains on the 2019 count or for 2020. Ask if they know about their racial representation and how they think they are doing/can do better.
a press that isn’t
friendly to women: OK, only one of these is at AWP this year, but go ahead and
let them know that they aren’t very equitable in their publishing of women and
ask if they’re doing anything to change this. Ask how they might improve their
representation of women of color.
a press that isn’t on the VIDA count list: There are so many of these! Ask them how many women editors they have, editors of color, queer editors? Are they actively recruiting marginalized voices? What are their strategies? Do they pay? Are they interested in hearing from our members? Particularly if there are women tabling, and specifically women of color, thank them for the work they are hopefully doing to ensure more equity in publishing.
4) Ask them to look for
Women Who Submit members in their slush piles, and to be on the lookout for
submissions during our Annual Submission Blitz in August!
5) Record your
interaction. Did they seem receptive to WWS’s mission? Any names of editors or
upcoming submission deadlines you should note? Will you send them work?
Press designations from the 2018 VIDA Count: Book Fair location or N/A (not attending)
Friendly Presses
+60% women published McSweeney’s: T1930 The Missouri Review: N/A Prairie Schooner: 1668-1669 The Normal School: N/A Pleiades: T2034 The Cincinnati Review: 1533, 1534
+50% women published Tin House: 1635 Granta: N/A Boston Review: N/A Ninth Letter: 1532 Jubilat: N/A Colorado Review: 1430 Conjunctions: N/A Virginia Quarterly: 1129 Fence: 1751 n+1: T1321 The Believer: 1643-1644 New England Review: N/A Kenyon Review: 1655
Getting Better: (made improvements >+5% in more equitable representation, but still not to 50%) Poetry: 1457 The New Yorker: N/A Gettysburg Review: 1135 Southwest Review: T259 Harvard Review: T1220
Male-Dominated Presses (less than 40% women represented) The Times Literary Supplement: N/A The Nation: N/A The Threepenny Review: N/A London Review of Books: N/A The Atlantic: N/A The New York Review of Books: 1058
Find us for WWS cards at the ACCOLADES Release Party on Thursday, March 5th from 4pm-7pm at La Botanica or at the ACCOLADES Book Signing on Friday, March 6th from 12pm-2pm at table Nosotrxs: More Than Books, 1038.
Noriko Nakada writes, blogs, tweets, parents, and teaches middle school in Los Angeles. Publications include: Through Eyes Like Mine (2010), Overdue Apologies (2012), and I Tried (2019). Excerpts, essays, and poetry have appeared in Catapult, Meridian, Kartika, Hippocampus, Compose, Linden Avenue and elsewhere.
February has been exciting! WWS partnered with #DignidadLiteraria and Antioch University Los Angeles to host the conversation, “Latinos and the Crisis in U.S. Publishing,” addressing the American Dirt and Flatiron controversy first ignited by Myriam Gurba’s review, “Pendeja, You Ain’t Steinbeck: My Bronca with Fake-Ass Social Justice Literature” published at Tropics of Meta. The panel conversation featured, Roxane Gay (founder of Gay Mag), Myriam Gurba (author of Mean), Romeo Guzman (editor at Tropics of Meta), Christopher Soto (cofounder of Undocupoets), Wendy C. Ortiz (author of Excavation), and moderated by yours truly. The night included a community conversation where those in the audience were invited to share their own grievances and solutions. You can see coverage of the night from L.A. Times, or watch the full conversation on the WWS Facebook page.
From left to right: Christopher Soto, Myriam Gurba, Romeo Guzman, Roxane Gay, Wendy C. Ortiz.
This past weekend we hosted our first public workshop of 2020 at the Exposition Park Regional Library. Saturday, February 8th, we began at 10am with “Should I Go?” a discussion on applying to and attending creative writing programs with Dana Johnson, Sara Borjas, and Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera. They talked about financial barriers, family expectations, traversing white spaces, and more. You can catch the full conversation on the WWS Facebook page. At this event we also gifted five regrants to WWS members to offset submission fees. Our next regrants will be offered in May.
We are excited to announce the release of our very first anthology, ACCOLADES, edited by Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera and Rachael Warecki and published by Jamii Publishing. Join us Thursday, March 5th at 4pm at La Botanica in San Antonio for our AWP release party featuring Sakae Manning, Désirée Zamorano, Cybele Garcia Kohel, Kate Maruyama, Cynthia Carlson, Heather Romero Kornblum, Sehba Sarwar, Tanya Ko Hong, Mia Nakaji Monnier, Leticia Urieta, and hosted by Noriko Nakada. This anthology was made possible by the Center for Cultural Innovation, Investing in Tomorrow grant.
New this month, we welcome back former “Claps and Cheers” editor, Ramona Pilar Gonzales with her new series, “Storytelling in Action,” which highlights interesting, alternative professional applications for (creative) writing skills and experience: podcasting, marketing, content creation/development, and whatever else there might be! Ramona Pilar Gonzales writes plays, prose, and songs. Her works have been produced around Los Angeles, published online and in print, and performed across Southern California. Her dramatized essay “Del Plato a la Boca” was produced via a grant from La Plaza Cultura y Artes Foundation.
Here at the WWS website, we offer new content every Wednesday. Be sure to visit us each week for new writing from “Submitting on a Budget” with Lisbeth Coiman, “Closing the Gap” with Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, “Storytelling in Action” with Ramona Pilar Gonzales, “Breathe and Push” with Noriko Nakada, and “WWS Publication Round Up” with Laura K. Warrell published on the last day of the month. And check out our guidelines and consider submitting an essay to any of the above.
Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo is the daughter of Mexican immigrants and the author of Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge (Sundress Publications 2016). A former Steinbeck Fellow, Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange winner, and Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grantee, she’s received residencies from Hedgebrook, Ragdale, National Parks Arts Foundation and Poetry Foundation. A Macondo Writers’ Workshop member, she has work published in Acentos Review, CALYX, crazyhorse, and American Poetry Review among others. A dramatization of her poem “Our Lady of the Water Gallons,” directed by Jesús Salvador Treviño, can be viewed at latinopia.com. She is a cofounder of Women Who Submit.
When I first saw the Vroman’s Bookstore event for American Dirt had been cancelled I thought to call up a new guy and set up a date for Tuesday now that my night was clear, but then I waited. I remembered the #DignidadLiteraria manifesto just out from Myriam Gurba, David Bowles, and Roberto Lovato. I went back and read their call to actions and thought, what if something else took its place?
At first I waited to see if something was already in the works. I mean, the call had already been put out to protest the event. People were ready, but I waited to see who might still be going. A few others asked the same question on Twitter. I sent a DM to Myriam–whose critique of AD was the first voice of dissent on the issue–asking if anything was being planned and waited for a response.
I know Myriam through the LA literary scene, we once featured together, but I don’t know her really, and yet, her words have saved me.
When the El Paso shooting happened on August 3, 2019 killing 22 people and injuring 24 others, and the news came out that the shooter was targeting Mexicans, I was horrified and heartbroken. Later that same week my family gathered for our annual summer pool party, and when I panned across the 80+ family members in their different shades of brown, I thought if a person wanted to kill Mexicans we were an easy target gathered in the open and covered in nothing but swimsuits and sunshine at a public El Monte pool. It’s as if we were flaunting it. I should have been laughing with my tías and racing my nieces, but instead I kept a watch on the entrance gate and marked every new arrival who came through looking out for any persons I didn’t know.
That week I was scared silent.
But Myriam had words. On August 5th, just two days after the horrific event, she had this to share on Instagram.
Simple. To the point. And yet, one of the hardest things to say in that moment. Through her words on social media, I felt seen and not alone. She helped me find my bravery again.
I may not know Myriam, but I know it isn’t easy being that one voice time and time again, and so when I hadn’t heard back via Twitter I thought, She doesn’t always have to do the heavy lifting. I, too, can do something at Vroman’s. It’s my local bookstore, after all, and Myriam can be the one to call up a honey and enjoy her night.
So that’s what I did.
I started by emailing a call to my friends and organizers, a list of people I actually see and work with and trust on a regular. Most sent back encouraging regrets and maybes if traffic was kind. It was a Tuesday night, and though I’m a San Gabriel Valley local, most of my compatriots are not. I pushed on.
Next I put the call out on social media. Though I don’t have a big following, I figured I might catch a few people, and thankfully, others reposted the call as well. Over a day, I had two people confirmed to join.
The morning of I woke with the idea to reach out to Vroman’s and see if they’d officially host us. They had the space going unused, and maybe if I had this piece of the puzzle more people would join. They said no, but that an #ownvoices event is in the works for March 21st. Would I like to be involved?
Sure.
Was what I wrote out in the reply email but didn’t press send. I left the computer for a while and went on to get ready for the day and drive to work. On the drive, where I do my most intense thinking, I drafted a response in my head. When I arrived at the office, I sent it off.
“I appreciate Vroman’s planning an #ownvoices reading in March, but I find it unfortunate that the organization doesn’t see value in having two #ownvoices events. You have an opportunity to support your local immigrant and children of immigrant communities as well as other readers and writers of color by opening up a space [that] is currently going unused. While the March event will likely feature books and writers already on your shelves, this is a chance give space to indie, emerging, and newer writers who are currently hurting from lack of representation and support in publishing.
I hope you reconsider. Thanks for your time. “
By now it was noon, and I had told people to meet at Vroman’s at 7pm. I waited.
The Vroman’s rep wrote back that they would still not host us without time to promote, but they would be interested in collaborating on such an event with me. This seemed good: open communication and a possible future event featuring my fellow writers. The questions became, Do I call off the event? Do I tell Vroman’s we’re already planning to be there?
I reached out to two trusted friends, and one was available for feedback. After some more thought, I sent a reply.
“Thank you for the invitation to work on either the March 21st event or a separate event. I appreciate your interest in building bridges with local writers of color both already featured at Vroman’s and those not yet on the shelves. I do want to work with you on a future event.
The idea to host a reading tonight came out of a call from #DignidadLiteraria–a collective created by Myriam Gurba, David Bowles, and Roberto Lovato–to organize read-ins and other actions, and the canceling of the AD event felt the perfect time to act in solidarity with the work they’ve been doing. I do have a small group of people interested in coming out tonight. I know you can’t host us at this time, but would it be possible for us to gather in the outside courtyard at 7pm? I would encourage people to patron the store to buy Marcelo’s book and other picks from the #ownvoices displays.
I want to honor the store’s wishes and continue this conversation beyond today, but I still feel compelled to join with people tonight in either in the courtyard or another space close by.”
Vroman’s gave us permission to gather in the courtyard.
At 6pm, friend and advocate, Désirée Zamorano treated me to a quick happy hour bite and glass of wine down the street. At 6:30pm I brought out my roll-away amp and speaker, a few blank posters, Sharpies, and an armload of #ownvoices books and started setting up.
On one poster I wrote: “I grew up crossing the border on Saturday mornings.”
The publishing industry (and movie industry) believes in only one portrayal of the border, but I actually grew up going to Tijuana with my parents for day shopping trips. We’d buy school shoes, Christmas presents, and inventory for their concession stand at Pico Rivera Sports Arena. My weekends were spent in three places: my grandmother’s house in Boyle Heights, shopping malls in Tijuana, and selling candy to Tigres del Norte fans in Pico Rivera, but that’s not the border story big publishing wants to hear. I tell it anyway.
Right at 7pm, friends Kate Maruyama, Lauren Eggert-Crowe, Ashaki M. Jackson, and Luivette Resto walked up. I encouraged people to write their own messages on posters provided, and we displayed the words with the books I brought.
At 7:15 we began with Désirée Zamorano reading her essay “Scarification” published at Acentos Review. Next up was F. Douglas Brown reading a basketball poem in honor of the fallen star and father, Kobe Bryant. Sehba Sarwar read from her newly released novel, Black Wings and shared how it was difficult for her to publish the book because publishers and editors wanted to put her in a box she did not belong in. Angela M. Sanchez shared an essay on the colonization of the ahuácatl/aguacate/avocado. Josh Evans read poems about his Black experience and wanting to fit in. Luivette Resto read work from Judith Ortiz Cofer and Puerto Rican ancestral poet, Julia de Burgos. I closed out with a poem from Sara Uribe’s Antígona González and my poem “To Be the Daughter of Immigrants” about those Pico Rivera days.
By 8:15 we were done and the audience had grown to about 20. People coming in and out of the store had stopped by to listen. A mother and daughter sat right up front for the whole thing. When I talked to them after, I found out that they had come out to see what American Dirt was all about. “All I knew was Oprah picked it,” the mother said and laughed that maybe that was a poem. The daughter talked about a writer coming to visit her class. They were happy to have found us. I met a shy Latinx librarian. I met booksellers and a rep from the the publisher, and looking back now, I wish I could have talked to more people.
In the end, I’m glad we were able to gather together, and I’m thankful for those who showed support along the way. If I were to do it over, I would have brought more books to display and asked my friends to amplify the call sooner so more people could join, but in the end, I’m happy for all the waiting and starting small.
This is all to say, You, too, can host a #DignidadLiteraria read-in. I hope you do. One thing I take from Myriam Gurba is we cannot be silent.
Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo is the daughter of Mexican immigrants and the author of Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge (Sundress Publications 2016). A former Steinbeck Fellow, Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange winner, and Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grantee, she’s received residencies from Hedgebrook, Ragdale, National Parks Arts Foundation and Poetry Foundation. A Macondo Writers’ Workshop member, she has work published in Acentos Review, CALYX, crazyhorse, and American Poetry Review among others. A dramatization of her poem “Our Lady of the Water Gallons,” directed by Jesús Salvador Treviño, can be viewed at latinopia.com. She is a cofounder of Women Who Submit.
It comes in nerve-frizzling, stomach-turning uncertainty. I
scour every sentence, every phrase, triple second-guess myself. I ask my
trusted readers to give me thoughts and cuts and end notes and validation
before I submit.
It takes me months sometimes to craft and hone and spit-shine a piece until I deem it ready for world. I imagine the world will judge all the micro-choices, the thin premise, the overwrought vines of ideas I could not prune back. And so I draft, and revise, and put aside, pick up again, add some, cut more, trim, reorder, cut the opening, extend the ending, carve, whittle, sculpt. I workshop myself weary.
And even then, I am unsure, doubting, wondering: who will
read, what will they think, is it as perfect as I can make it to be beyond
reproach, likeable, no—loveable—to all. I want to engage with the world, and my
people-pleasing bones make it very hard to do so without worrying what others
will think of this collection of words.
My first published essay took a sizeable lifetime and an MFA program to create, excerpted from a still unpublished memoir I had spent years writing and revising. I loved that piece (“The Storm Between Us” at Bellevue Literary Review), but the work that went into chiseling it into diamond-sharp focus was months and months in the making.
I wonder if the chiseling was my worry. It was hard stone to
handle. All the revising was procrastination of a sort. It was nerve-wracking
offering this story to the world: a braided piece about the DNA I inherited
from my grandmother, her hospitalization in Galveston, a dip back into the
hurricane history of that seaside town that mirrored the storm of mental
illness that threatened to crush us both.
When I told my father that I was writing about my own hospitalization a decade after the hell of it he said, “Why? Why would people want to read about that?” I want to say that he was trying to protect me, this man who talks about everything but the stories I most want to hear. I want to say he was not saying my story does not matter. That he was trying to shield me from criticism perhaps, or a lack of regard. I want to be generous in the face of his disregard.
But his question echoes across the years still. Even though I
know now and knew then that my story matters—our stories matter—and are worth
being well-told. Worth something not just to the heart of the listener or
reader, but to the heart of the teller, the writer.
And yet. The question still dogs me as I try to help
manuscripts years in the making find the light. As I become the advocate for my
own story because sometimes your queries go unanswered, and emails from
contests all start in apology and sometimes the agent shops a work and there
are no bites and they quit the literary world for another one a bit more kind.
Still: I am learning to breathe and push the work out. I am
learning to submit. Poems are easiest, bite-sized, not so demanding of working
and reworking that prose and longer works require. Perhaps not so vulnerable to
judgment. But still there are those jitters when I know a piece will go up, and
someone might read it, maybe even my father, and I do not know how or if it
will be received. I do not know what I am blind to in my own work, what I say
that might offend. I do not know if you are even here with me still, holding on
to the end, giving this a few minutes of your precious time.
There are many worthy words out there, and claiming space
for my own is part of the writing life I have the hardest time with. But the
words are worth it. And so: to submit is the precise word for this process. I
submit despite the fear, I submit despite certain rejection, I submit despite
the echoes of my father and the self-doubt and the uncertainty. I submit, I
submit, I submit and every time, there is less apology and more clarity.
Hazel Kight Witham is a writer, teacher, activist, and artist whose work can be found in Bellevue Literary Review, Two Hawks Quarterly, Rising Phoenix Review, Angels Flight, Sixfold, Zoetic Press’s NonBinary Review, Lunch Ticket and Lady/Liberty/Lit. She lives and breathes in Los Angeles with her family. www.hazelkightwitham.com
