Workshops

Women Who Submit facilitates free quarterly workshops and panels on writing, publishing, career building, and community. These workshops and panels are 75 minutes long and are led by local professional women and nonbinary writers, editors, publishers, agents, and other leaders in literary publishing.

WWS workshops and panels are archived on our YouTube channel. 

WWS workshops and panels are followed by an in-person new member orientation. Interested writers much attend a new member orientation in order to become a member of WWS-Los Angeles. There are no membership fees to join. Registration is required and opens one month prior to the event.

If you are not in Los Angeles, please visit our Join Us page to find a chapter in your area.

NECESSARY MATERIALS: 
– Laptop for orientation, research, and online submissions
– Crafted poems/essay/short story: something submission ready

If you are new to WWS, please register HERE.

Saturday, February 8, 2025 at 10:00am Pacific: “Making of  a Micropress” featuring Nikia Chaney (Jamii Press), Cati Porter (Inlandia Publishings), Micah Tasaka (innateDIVINITYbooks), and moderated by Noriko Nakada (Strikethrough Press). This panel is on Zoom.

 

About the panel: Hear from publishers and editors of four micro presses to learn what it takes to independently publish new poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction and what drives them to do this work. Participants will be given submission tips for sending work to these editors and other spaces like theirs. 

Bios: 

Nikia Chaney is the author of us mouth and two chapbooks, Sis Fuss and ladies, please. She served as Inlandia Literary Laureate (2016-2018). Her poetry has been published in the Iowa Review, Pearl, Sugarhouse Review, and Vinyl, and her memoir ladybug was published by Inlandia in 2022. Nikia is the founding editor of shufPoetry, an online poetry journal for experimental poetry.  She is also the founder of Jamii Publishing, an independent press for literature based in community projects.

Noriko Nakada is a multi-racial Asian American who creates fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art to capture the stories she has been told not to talk about. She is the author of the Through Eyes Like Mine memoir series. Her work has been published in Hippocampus, Catapult, Linden Ave, and elsewhere. Noriko serves on the board for Women Who Submit, an organization empowering women and non-binary writers to submit their work for publication. Works in progress include Shades of Distance: essays measuring one family’s proximity to whiteness,  Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop: My Family’s Struggle with Mental Illness, and Rice Paper Superheroes, a historical novel about a Japanese American family’s incarceration during World War II.

Cati Porter’s latest poetry collection is small mammals (Mayapple Press, 2023). Other recent poetry collections include Novel (Bamboo Dart Press, 2022) and The Body at a Loss (CavanKerry Press, 2019). Cati is the recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship from the California Arts Council for 2023-24. In 2010, she received her MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in poetry from Antioch University Los Angeles. Cati Porter lives in Inland Southern California where she runs her Poemeleon: A Journal of Poetry and directs Inlandia Institute, a 501(c)(3) literary nonprofit.

Micah Tasaka (田坂舞花) is a queer, nonbinary poet, artist, and reiki master from Colton, California. They are author of Expansions (Jamii Publishing, 2017) and editor at innateDIVINITYbooks. Currently, Micah is an MFA candidate at the University of New Orleans and works for Rainbow Pride Youth Alliance as the Wellness Center Director, providing programming to LGBTQ+ youth in the Inland Empire. www.micahtasaka.com @kinokono_inaka

SCHEDULE

10:00am-11:15am: “Making a Micropress” on Zoom

11:15am-11:45am: Break

11:45am-1:00pm: In-person New Member Orientation – Location TBD

11:45am-1:00pm: In-person Returning Member Submission Party – Location TBD

Upcoming in 2025: 

Saturday, May 10, 2025 – WWS Literary Workshop on Applying to Residencies

Saturday, August 9, 2025 – WWS Literary Panel with Booksellers & Distributors

Saturday, November 8, 2025 – WWS Literary Workshop, “Write Like a Goddess” with Diosa Xochiquetzalcóatl and Brenda Vaca

PREVIOUS WORKSHOPS are archived on our YouTube Channel.