Resources
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Chicago Literary Hall of Fame
Founded in 2008 by the Chicago Writers Association, the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame maps the city's literary heritage with links to bookstores, journals, and historic places. They also offer competitions for local writers. Their resources are a good place to start planning your publicity outreach for a book launch in the Chicago area.
From a Secret Location
This site is the companion to A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960-1980 (Granary Books, 1998). It is a history and digital archive of poetry zines and small press ephemera from the "mimeograph revolution" that circulated work by poets in such movements as the Black Mountain poets, Beats, New York School, Fluxus, concrete poetry, Black Arts, deep image, ethnopoetics, and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E.
Zen Patriarch Dōgen Takes a Ride in a Self-Driving Car
By James K. Zimmerman
and Dōgen asks the salesman:
Where was the self
when the car was a thought?
When the thought was a sketch?
When the sketch was design?
Where was the self
on the assembly line
in Alabama? On a truck
from Mexico? A ship
from China?
Is the self in the carbon
and iron of steel?
In the gleam of chrome?
The slick skin of PVC?
Where is the self in the cowhide
of custom bucket seats?
Where do the seats go
when the car is incinerated?
Is the windshield still sand?
Was the sand always glass?
Where is the self that thinks
it can drive itself? In GPS?
Bluetooth? ABS? Cruise control?
Show me the self before
the doors were installed.
Show me the self after
the car is totaled.
After the crusher comes.
Show me the self after
the parts return to earth and sky.
This poem was first published in Fourteen Hills and is reprinted from:
Blacklist Lit
Launched in 2024, Blacklist Lit seeks to be a clearinghouse of information about literary journals and markets that treat writers poorly. Send them your experiences of publishers who are unresponsive to queries, fail to honor publication promises, or misuse personal information.
Girl with a Pearl Earring
By Patricia Olson
Her amber eyes follow me
deep as earth's core,
pure concentration
from beneath blue silk
wrapping her head,
her day's work done
she sits posed,
poised for the painter,
the portrait that hides
secrets, questions, longings.
Who is she?
Who is the painter?
The thread binds them
In breathless silence.
Golden light flows
Through shutters, stretches
like lace across her face,
her breath clouds the room,
the needle burned in flame
pierces her ear, the blood
wiped away, the pearl
dangles, glistening,
an opalescent tear,
his eyes longing,
painting her to eternity
her eyes, a Madonna
or eyes of God's judgment,
staring, following me,
there is no escape.
This poem is reprinted from:
Small Press Economies: A Dialogue
In this 2023 article in Chicago Review, CSU Poetry Center director Hilary Plum and poet Matvei Yankelevich (co-founder of Ugly Duckling Presse) examine the barriers to small press books being carried in bookstores or featured in major review outlets. Among other recommendations, they call on independent bookstores to do better at supporting small press titles.
Chill Subs List of Magazines That Publish Young Writers
Writing resource site Chill Subs posted this list on their Instagram in 2024, with 43 journals that regularly accept work by authors under 18. Some, like Lunch Ticket and Gigantic Sequins, also publish work by adults, while others are youth-only.
Climate Visionaries Artists’ Project
Fiction writer and journalist Lauren Groff partnered with the environmentalist group Greenpeace to curate this selection of creative writing that raises awareness about the climate crisis. Contributors include Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Min Jin Lee, Dorothea Lasky, Karen Russell, and R.O. Kwon.
Passeridae
By Julie Novak-McSweeney
We open our hands and bid the past farewell.
A dead leaf falls. Another leaf grows green
in the oaks where sparrow-weavers dwell.
Now is rooted then—but we can dwell
in other rooms, can play out greening scenes
and open our hands to bid the past farewell.
Trailing dead addresses, moving well
and often, in flight from numb routine,
far from where sparrow-weavers dwell.
What is home, we wondered, hardened shells
Of children that we were, quarantined
From pasts to which we finally bid farewell
And thrive despite, and sing our citadel
of roots into brave being. Unforeseen,
this blessing of a leafy place to dwell.
We broke the chain of violence, passed from hell
on earth to healing. Now the slate is clean.
We open our hands to bid the past farewell
and look to where the sparrow-weavers dwell.
This poem won 2nd Prize for Rhyming Poetry in the 18th Annual Writer's Digest Poetry Awards.
Scraps Journal
Scraps is an online journal that "showcases the abandoned work of writers and artists," defined as work that the creator has indefinitely shelved after receiving several rejection letters from traditional publications. Editors say, "These pieces should be complete and polished, and mostly competent, but not quite good enough." Along with a short piece of abandoned work, you should submit a sample of rejection letters and a brief reflection (750 words) on what you think went wrong with the work. The editors will remix the rejection letters to create a new collaborative piece of art, such as graphics or illustrations, erasure poetry, essays, music, or bibliomancy.
Months to Years
Founded in 2017, Months to Years is an attractively designed online journal of poetry, essays, and artwork about terminal illness and mortality. See website for submission periods and suggested topics.
The Innocent Loss of First Rights
In this 2023 article for the writing resource site AuthorsPublish, Craig Westmore explains what "unpublished" means in contest and magazine submission guidelines, and how to avoid inadvertently making your work ineligible. Complicating the issue is the fact that journals' rules differ. Sharing your work for feedback in online forums, for example, can disqualify it for some submission opportunities but not others.
Momma, Did You Hear the News?
By Sanya Whittaker Gragg, with illustrations by Kim Holt. This sensitive picture book features a Black family giving their two young sons "the Talk" about how to avoid being shot by the police. The book manages children's fears about current events in an age-appropriate way, and also conveys a nuanced message that many police officers are good people doing a dangerous job.
Ode
By Luci Shaw
The stillness of last night's dew, falling,
The ripeness of a perfect peach,
The coupled sound of two loons, calling,
My friends' connections, each to each.
The thorny rose's sharp perfection,
Forgiveness offered to a foe,
The firmness of a son's connection
Though seasons come and seasons go.
A violent thunderstorm retreating,
A candle's flame, however brief,
The sudden joy of kindred meeting,
Or autumn's colors, leaf by leaf.
The promise of a friend's arrival
To share a meal and dream a dream,
To work together for revival
Of some beloved, forgotten scheme.
Life's rhythmic pulse forever thrumming
in tune with love's eternal song.
Forgive me, if you hear me humming
for joy that you and I belong.
RHINO Poetry Archives
RHINO Poetry, a prestigious journal, has made selections from its issues from 2010-present free to read online. Browse work by jason b. crawford, Joseph Fasano, Amorak Huey, Cynthia Huntington, Sally Wen Mao, and many more.
The School Magazine
A project of the New South Wales Department of Education (Australia), the School Magazine publishes poems, stories, articles, and plays that have literary and academic merit for elementary-school readers, typically ages 8-12. The four magazines under their publishing umbrella, each for a different age group, are titled Countdown, Blast Off, Orbit, and Touchdown. This is a paying market. See website for their values and content suggestions.
Good River Review
A publication of Spalding University's Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing in Louisville, KY, Good River Review publishes short creative writing in a variety of genres: poetry, fiction, essays, 10-minute stage plays or short film scripts, immersive journalism pieces, and book reviews. A notable feature of this magazine is that they publish writing for children and young adults in these genres alongside work for adults. See website for length limits in each category.
Spirit Captive
By Helen Bar-Lev
This is a city that does not let me go;
it accosts me in its alleyways,
nails me to its crossroads,
fixes me to its doorposts
Humanity pours through its gates
tainted honey and soured milk,
poets and priests, politicians and heretics,
kippah and kefiyah
it sings in harps and sirens and muezzins,
in the chanting of its many religions,
the holy now polluted, at battle with itself
Every street and corner
is inscribed in my genetic memory,
its stones are engraved in the shape of my face,
chiseled into my bones,
glow golden as clouds turn red at sunset
and a huge moon illuminates its night
I have lived here forever, a captive from the past,
since King David through Romans, Crusaders, Mamelukes,
I am buried in the tombs of prophets and messiahs,
in the rhetoric of their memories, sacred and blasphemed,
now corrupted by greed, zealots and bigotry
Yet each time I return I tumble back into a history
that has forfeited its right to claim me,
and emerge into a present not worthy of those ancient memories
How I long for the peace of the nomad,
unattached, not attracted to any land,
whose home is the world
but I cannot escape the magnetism of these mountains
where my blood flows best,
familiar forever, so compelling so repelling
I must obliterate Jerusalem from my chromosomes,
sever the silver cord that connects us,
to negate the forces drawing me here eon after eon,
to correct some flaw in my destiny
that causes my soul to resonate to its elevation,
its light, its sunsets, its stones and moon
until I am able to resist this repetition of fate,
escape the multiplicity of beliefs that stimulate and stifle
so that I may continue without the burden of its presence
invading my dreams
Thus I entreat as I hover over synagogues and mosques,
churches, museums, schools,
markets, over this city that flows through my veins
and into the soil in which I am embedded,
and from which I recoil
I need to be free, for Jerusalem to release me,
so I may replant myself in other places,
to find the peace that has never existed here,
but my roots...
What shall I do with my roots?
Active Voice Magazine
Active Voice Magazine is a youth-led literary journal publishing creative writing that inspires progressive social change. The editors are American high school and college students, with poets A.B. Spellman and Eduardo Martínez-Leyva as adult advisors. See their website for submission periods and themes.
AuthorsPublish List of 35 Literary Journals Accepting Translations
Writing resource site AuthorsPublish compiled this list in 2023 of three dozen reputable magazines that are open to English translations of poetry, fiction, or essays. The list includes science fiction, mystery, and horror magazines as well as literary journals.
Peek Inside a Successful Book Proposal
Nieman Storyboard, a publication of Harvard's Nieman Foundation for Journalism, showcases exceptional narrative nonfiction and offers resources for writing and marketing your work. In this article, Kim Cross shares the lengthy proposal that secured a contract for In Light of All Darkness, her book about the Polly Klaas kidnapping. She annotates the key elements that made this pitch more successful than her earlier efforts. Click on the "Story Annotations" header for other craft articles by journalists explaining how they researched and structured a feature story.
The Most Common Formatting Mistakes When Submitting to a Literary Journal
This 2023 blog post by Erik Harper Klass from SubmitIt, an editing and submissions service, walks you through the standard formatting that literary journal editors expect. In the age of online submissions, some rules have changed from the days when typewriters and mail were the norm.
Wild Must Be Wild
By Jeanne Blum Lesinski
—after Depression in Winter
by Jane Kenyon
There comes a little space
between the south side of the boulder
and the perennial garden
just right for the rabbit burrow
I found that spring: kittens
the size of Easter eggs almost
ready to wean and run—
or freeze, in hope the hawk is blind.
My daughter scooped one up,
carried it around in her hoodie,
like her own Velveteen Rabbit,
until I told her: wild must be wild.
I prayed there be no traffic
as the kittens scattered ahead of us
across the road to the woods.
I opened my eyes to waving grasses
and sighed.
White Man’s Grave
By Richard Dooling. This anti-colonialist satire from the early 1990s holds up extraordinarily well. One could describe it as a talkback to Heart of Darkness combined with Tom Wolfe's style of exaggerated depictions of American folly and greed. When a Peace Corps volunteer goes missing in the jungle of an unnamed West African country, his naive Midwestern best friend embarks on a quest to rescue him, blundering dangerously and ridiculously into a web of intrigue involving witchcraft, foreign-backed coups, and misdirected international aid. Meanwhile, the missing man's father, a ruthless bankruptcy lawyer, starts to fear that he's been hexed...and that maybe he deserves it.
The Reformatory
By Tananarive Due. This gripping ghost story was inspired by a real-life ancestor of the author's, who died in a reformatory in the Jim Crow South. "Haints" are the least of Robbie Stephens' problems when he's sent to a sadistic juvenile prison for a trumped-up offense against a white boy in the rural Florida of 1950. The town's white power brokers want to use him as a pawn to bring his father out of hiding; Klansmen and police alike are gunning for Robert Senior because of his work organizing millworkers and registering Black voters. Meanwhile, Robbie's teenage sister and her 80-year-old godmother are discovering that even NAACP lawyers aren't a match for the racist judicial system. Freeing Robbie will require supernatural intervention.
The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal
By Jonathan Mooney. In this affecting and funny road-trip memoir, the author decided to fight his internalized ableism as a former special-education student by traveling through America in an old schoolbus to meet other neurodivergent and learning-disabled people. His personal experiences are interwoven with historical background on the social construction of conditions such as autism, Down syndrome, and dyslexia, with suggestions for how we might frame cognitive differences in a less judgmental way.
SlashGear’s List of Best Websites to Find and Download eBooks for Free
SlashGear, a technology news site, compiled this list in 2023 of their favorite sites for free and low-cost e-books and audiobooks. These include OverDrive, an e-book lending library, and LibriVox, which offers free audio versions of public-domain books.
BookBaby’s Guide to Book Pricing for Authors
BookBaby is a leading vendor of self-publishing and related services. In this 2023 article on their website, writer and editor Philip Kinsher breaks down the costs of publishing and marketing your book, and the factors to consider when setting the book's price in various formats.
Send $19.99 for Supplements and Freedom: The Chapbook
By Noah Berlatsky. This satirical chapbook of found-poetry and hybrid texts includes a pantoum based on Joe Rogan's right-wing talk radio rants, absurd diagrams and multiple-choice questions mashing up the Graduate Record Exam with The Artist's Way, and a Swinburne double sestina featuring Jordan Peterson's pronouncements about masculinity and lobsters. It's like scrolling social media while dropping acid.
Centaur
Launched in 2023, Centaur's motto is "Lit Half Civilized, Half Wild". This quarterly online journal specializes in hybrid-genre pieces, 400 words maximum. Authors and artists published in Centaur will be featured on their Bookstore page, receive a small honorarium, and be nominated for prizes such as Best of the Net.
Tenebrous Press
Tenebrous Press, a small press specializing in New Weird Horror, is open year-round for pitches of novels, novellas, and graphic novels. They offer a modest advance and royalties. Books in their catalogue include Your Body Is Not Your Body, an anthology of trans body horror, and Green Inferno, an anthology of climate-change and environmental horror.
Carousel
Established in 1983, Carousel is a Canadian literary and arts journal that is now published exclusively online. Sign up for their email list to be notified when their poetry and fiction reading periods open. Carousel's #USEReview feature is open year-round, seeking literary reviews that are written in an innovative or genre-bending style. They are especially interested in reviews of hybrid literature, graphic novels, or experimental poetry and prose. Reviewers receive a small payment.
Bulb Culture Collective
Bulb Culture Collective is open year-round to submissions of poetry that was previously published by a now-defunct journal or website, or that was published at least two years ago (regardless of the journal's current status). They will share a new poem on their website twice a week and promote it on social media. Please include credit to the original publisher, and any relevant content warnings about sexual violence or domestic abuse.
Great Place Books
Founded by novelists Alex Higley and Emily Adrian and literary agent Monika Woods, Great Place Books seeks to publish "rigorous, weird, beautiful books" of literary fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and translations. Authors in their catalog include Emma Catherine Perry, Julia Hannafin, and Pilar Fraile (translated by Lizzie Davis). They accept un-agented submissions.
Find Editors Who Like You
In this 2023 column for Lit Mag News, poet and freelance journalist Noah Berlatsky advises cultivating long-term relationships with sympathetic journals and presses. Traditional career advice tells you to treat lesser-known venues as mere stepping-stones to more prestigious publications, but if the latter opportunities don't materialize, perhaps you're just depriving yourself of satisfaction in the career you actually have.
Lulu’s Veil and Jocasta’s Brooch
By Dana Curtis
In answer to your question: I'm pretty sure
all the birds are dead now—this will teach
them not to think such dark thoughts,
such purple blotches across
a cat's electric fur. In response
to the continental shift, may I
just say: I've always loved
cracks in the earth, web underfoot,
the veil I only wear at murder
trials or someone else's wedding. Think
about it. You'll be pleasantly surprised
at the result, at what holds diamonds,
the silk: the wayward river from
the eye socket. I spent a long time
looking for just the right frame—
black with a dial. It connects
to what I need to connect—historical
fragments jumping out of
the bright red box. In reference to
the shutting of the cemetery, the removal
of your mouth, the selling
of a crystal doorknob: yes
or no, maybe later, vivid.
Metanoia
By David Holper
The plane ticket,
the train ride, the shuttle
the taxi, even the first step,
onto the gravel, into the dirt,
the dust, your boots whispering
against the dry grass,
these are just dust motes dancing
over the surface: the real journey calls you
deeper into the soul's secret country
where all such journeys
must lead you beyond expectations,
beyond these hazy dreamings,
if you are to finally set right
what you have long known was broken from the beginning.
*Metanoia (Greek, noun): The journey of transforming
your mind, heart, self, or way of life.
Artificial Intelligence Manifesto at the Authors Guild
The Authors Guild, a venerable organization that advocates for authors' rights, issued this manifesto in 2023 to propose limits on the use of generative AI such as ChatGPT. The organization plans to lobby for laws and policies that will protect authors' copyrights, compensate them for the use of their work in training AI data sets, and allow them to opt out of such use, among other safeguards.
October Full Moon
by Marilyn McVicker
Standing on the hill, I look down the cove.
The roof glows radiant in the moonlight. It is
so bright, tonight I can see this page, clearly.
Stars canopy above. A chill in the air.
Dark forest forms a fringe to the scent
of rotting leaves, decaying grass. Last remaining
katydids sing their fading ostinato. Air is
electric with light, life at its zenith.
Inside my fleece jacket, I am warm. My blood
pulsates the liquid music of my life. Alive
in my veins. Electric.
When I am too old to stand here any longer,
will I wish I had stood here more?
1,001 Novels: A Library of America
Novelist and creative writing professor Susan Straight created this book recommendation list at StoryMaps, organized by the location in America that is the novel's setting or cultural milieu. View the map to find a book for a particular place, or browse her essays about the 11 cultural regions into which the Library is sorted. "The idea for this 'library of America' was born in 2016, when the news and the elections told of a country being irrevocably divided by politics, by ideas of red and blue, by arguments over who is American and who is not. For me, those arguments ignored the vast geography of our stories and novels, the ways people search for belonging, leave home or stay, and how every state is really many places. Those arguments also ignored our common dreams, fears, challenges, hopes and everyday experiences, which unite us, regardless of where we live," she says in this May 2023 Los Angeles Times opinion piece about the project.
Only Poems
Launched in 2023 by award-winning poets Shannan Mann and Karan Kapoor, Only Poems seeks to publish longer suites of poems by each contributor in order to showcase their style and range. Authors receive $55 for each feature. They are open year-round to submissions of up to 10 pages/10 poems. Unpublished work only. Follow specific formatting guidelines on website. Editors say, "We love prose poems, traditional forms (ghazals, villanelles, sestinas), love poems, sex poems, speculative poems, and experimental questionnaires, but we are not married to a style or genre."
circle
by Jess Chua
this negative cycle
where nothing changes
is a spiral of denial
time for me to start anew
leave everything behind
including you
London Proofreaders
London Proofreaders is an online proofreading and copyediting service. They say their unique selling proposition is that they assign two proofreaders to every text, for more thorough error-catching. At 12.50 pounds per 1,000 words, their rates are in line with typical US rates of 1-2 cents per word. London Proofreaders can work with academic papers from undergraduate to Ph.D level, business writing, and literary prose. They also offer novel editing and book proofreading.
Booklash: Literary Freedom, Online Outrage, and Language of Harm
PEN America is an organization that defends freedom of speech for writers worldwide. This thorough report from 2023 studies the negative impact of social media outrage on writers' freedom to address controversial topics. Although the critics in question are often motivated by progressive ideals such as anti-racism, the report argues, our political discourse suffers when publishers over-react by canceling book contracts or revising books without the author's permission. In many of the examples cited, the book's problems were capable of other interpretations, or the author's public behavior was too quickly conflated with the value of the book itself.
How to Find the Right Agent for Your Book
This 2023 article by Emily Harstone at the writing resource site AuthorsPublish gives an overview of the process of finding the right agents to query. The article includes links to scam-busting sites and online forums where you can find agents seeking work in your genre.
Editing by George
Bruno George is an experienced in-house and freelance editor who has worked on books published by Yale University Press, Microsoft, and the Seattle Art Museum, among others. He is a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient. He is available to help with your novels, art books, or technical writing. His companion site, Writing Your Life, offers memoir editing and ghostwriting services.
Night Talks
By Terri Kirby Erickson
When one would wake in the night, the other
followed. Then, in their bed, next to their window
that was always open, my mother and father
would talk to the sound of cars going by,
the hum of streetlights, the occasional bark
of a neighbor's dog. They spoke of high school
dances, family vacations, raising children,
being grandparents. And their faces, soft
with age and sleep, were hidden in the dark,
so they could speak at last of their lost son,
without any need to shield each other from
that pain. It must have been a relief to unpack
the shared sadness they courageously carried,
to put it down, if only for an hour. It was like
I could hear them from my own bed
across town, as I slipped into a deeper sleep,
reassured and comforted by their beloved
familiar voices echoing among the stars.
First published in ONE ART Poetry Journal
Story Monsters Ink
Story Monsters Ink publishes a glossy monthly magazine with children's book reviews, author interviews, and industry news. They also offer contests and publicity packages for indie authors of children's books.
Bean Sí
By Michael McKeown Bondhus
The first time I heard her keening,
I was lying under dark covers,
aching with dysphoria, but
the next morning everyone
was still alive, so I went back
to obsessing about
the body parts
that made me suffer but which I kept
because my lover said he loved them.
The bean sí wailed nightly,
and after two weeks I stopped
expecting death and started having dreams
about a mummy beneath a bog,
its preserved body perfect and just
the way I wanted mine to be.
My lover said I looked tired, so
I took medicine to stop dreaming,
moaned pleasure when he touched me
where I hated being touched.
I tried to love those places, I really did.
Ask my therapist and she'll tell you
how the bean sí's wails found their way
through the prerecorded thunderstorms
I used to help me sleep,
how the dreams turned into
visions, my friends and coworkers
transformed into beautiful mummies
with mouths full of grinding teeth.
My lover took off before the surgery.
The bean sí finally left after my unwanted
parts were given Christian burial
in a landfill for medical waste.
In Irish folklore, the bean sí (banshee) is the spirit of a woman whose wailing signals impending death, either of the hearer or a member of their family.
The Perch Journal
Literary journal The Perch is a project of the psychiatry program at the Yale School of Medicine. They publish creative writing and artwork on themes relating to mental health. Eligible genres include poetry, creative nonfiction, fiction, visual art, music, and academic work that is accessible to a general audience. See website for themed submission calls.
