Resources
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Stock Photo Resources at Canva
Canva, an online community sharing best practices in web design, has compiled this directory of sources for free stock photos that writers can use for blogs, book covers, and other promotional materials.
Stock Photo Secrets: Best Free Stock Photo Sites
Based in Germany, Stock Photo Secrets is a leading digital magazine dedicated to the stock photography industry. This section of their website explains the legal issues and hidden copyright pitfalls of using photos found online, and reviews two dozen favorite sites for free photos.
Stone. Bread. Salt.
By Norbert Hirschhorn. These wise, good-humored poems explore Jewish legends and mysticism, the blessings and pains of approaching one's ninth decade, and the author's experiences as both physician and patient.
Stoned
By Des Mannay
I'm like a pebble on a beach
with shingle running over me—
A scraping of ecstasy
with the passing of the tides
which are over too soon,
and I am left alone again
With the sun beating down on me—
bleaching me white
and baking the residue of salt
Until I crack—
at least inside I feel I do
But this is never really true
Appetite's whetted by the sea in you—
in reality
you were a piece of shingle
which was soon past
And only myself, the sun and sand
are still here
The skimming stone of life goes on.
First published in the No Tribal Dance anthology in the UK in 2017
Story Circle Book Reviews
Story Circle Book Reviews provides a review venue for women author-publishers and for women's work published by independent and university presses. The site's sponsor, Story Circle Network, also offers the Sarton Women's Book Awards for small press and self-published books by and about women, published in the US or Canada.
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.
StoryADay Writing Prompts Archive
StoryADay is a twice-yearly writing challenge where participants complete one short story per day in May and September. This website is the online hub for participants, offering inspiration and tips to keep the momentum going. The site includes an archive of prompts from past challenges, going back to May 2010.
Storyathon
Storyathon offers free competitions for students in grades 3-6 to write stories that are exactly 100 words. The challenges are designed to get young people excited about writing and teach them how to tighten their language, experiment with words, and focus their message. See website for new themes offered every semester.
Storyhouse Weekly Reader
The nonprofit Preservation Foundation was born in 1976 to encourage and preserve the "extraordinary stories of 'ordinary' people." Anyone can submit a personal life story or short fictional work for posting on their website. Their e-newsletter, the Storyhouse Weekly Reader, highlights one of the 1,000+ anecdotes in their archives.
Storyline Online
Storyline Online features picture books being read aloud by well-known actors such as Kristen Bell, Ernest Borgnine, Viola Davis, James Earl Jones, and Kiernan Shipka.
Storymatic
Storymatic is a box of writing prompts that doubles as a party game. The box of 360 cards has a shape and layout similar to Trivial Pursuit clue cards, with each card featuring a short phrase for a character trait or situation. Pull random cards from each section to generate an impromptu storytelling session or ideas for writing a scene. Other products in this series inclue Storymatic Kids (simpler language and concepts for ages 5+) and Rememory, which can be used for memoir-writing or icebreaker conversations at a party or reunion.
StoryQuarterly
SQ pays $150-$200 for accepted submissions, 8,000 words maximum. Enter online only. They seek to publish both prominent and first-time authors in every issue.
Student Scholarships
This website collects links to academic and vocational programs, grants, and scholarships. Free registration allows you to receive listings targeted to your geographic area and field of study.
Stunning Design Examples to Inspire Your Book Advertising
This 2024 article from the e-book bargains site BookBub showcases 25 well-designed advertisements for books in various genres and explains what makes them so effective.
Subject to Change
Accomplished collection of lively contemporary formal verse, ranging from a punning ode to the Nissan Stanza to a crown of sonnets that depicts the birth of feminism ("Notes from the Good-Girl Chronicles, 1963").
Submishmash Weekly
Free weekly e-newsletter from Submittable, a popular online submissions platform, contains news and opportunities for writers, artists, and filmmakers.
Submission Strategies: Advice from The Masters Review
In this blog post from the literary journal The Masters Review, editor Kim Winternheimer discusses the submission strategies that work best for different writers. Topics include whether to re-submit original or edited stories, targeting the right mix of top-tier and more accessible magazines, and how many pieces to send out at a time.
Submittable
This online submissions manager is used by a growing number of contests and journals. You can also use it to manage resumes and job postings.
Submittable’s Universal Submission Tracker
Launching in 2020, Submittable's Universal Submission Tracker is a new record-keeping feature available to anyone with an account at their online submissions platform. The designers say: "In addition to tracking the progress of submissions made using Submittable, you can now add submission details for any opportunity made outside of our platform, including the status, submission date and title, name of the organization reviewing your work, and internal notes specific to that submission."
Subscriber Poems for Black Lives Matter
Winning Writers launched this feature in June 2020 in response to police brutality against black Americans. Below is a selection of subscriber poems inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement.
COME BACK HOME! (Letter to a Moving Target)
by Mike Guinn
Dear Son,
This life is nothing but Saturday night autopsies, pre-ordered grave stones, a freedom you'll never know. It's hoping the Negro National Anthem justifies your skin just enough for you to realize that tattoos and K2 will never replace the scar tissue on your soul.
Your heritage is more than rope burns around history's black neck. It’s a deep desire for survival no matter how loudly homicide speaks of rivers.
This melanin is so rich that when this nation denies you your color, it will be impossible to feel safe in this house arrest called America.
And even after you've given this country all of your Africa and your life light goes dim because the sun refused you immunity. You'll realize that our fragile lives began on the back porch of shotgun houses, where camouflaged chalk lines silhouette themselves in the shade of a lonely bulls-eye searching for another black target and you already fit the profile!
And it's not your fault that you were born a verb in past tense, an unwilling subject in a sentence that kept on running.
This curse, this prison we call life is like playing peekaboo with Satan. And I'lI be that gospel stripper, quoting scripture, god's reluctant theologian. Because here you are, fractured by the manner in which the wind whistled and Emmett-Tilled your future.
Boy my love is rugged remnants of pain polished smooth by trial and error. It knows your heart like skeletons know crowded closets.
These streets will eat and rip and tear you apart SON!
They are as relentless as hurricanes and as unforgiving as white privilege. And I am dying inside the way this life intended, but not you!
You will not be blood stains on sidewalks or a redundancy of clichés rewinding themselves into tornadoes of fully refurbished lies.
You will not sag or smoke or walk around here entitled with the audacity to hold up clean hands like this world owes you something.
Because it don't.
Listen...I don't want your existence to be another statistic on the back page of history.
This life needs to know that if you died, at least you stood for something far more substantial than a bag of weed or pride.
There are good things to come son. But you have to be here to see em.
So do me a favor, lose the attitude, put down your ego, pull up yo pants and remember this!
That whether it be cop or stranger Just SHUT YO MOUTH. SMILE! STAY ALIVE...and Bring Yo Ass Home!
Cause these streets don't give a damn about young black men.
Reprinted by permission from Crying in Colors (Jazzy Kitty Publishing, 2010) by spoken-word poet and motivational speaker Mike Guinn.
****
I Can't Breathe!
by Yassin Senge
(in loving memory of George Floyd)
Blood from my father
And milk from my mother
We're both used to make
Milkshake
And yoghurt
For the hypocrite
Claiming that an ox was not productive
And the cow not reproductive
That their manure
Was not pure
That crops could not grow
Anymore
Then I as a calf
Was not strong enough
To stop the hypocrite
From taking me for meat.
Yassin Senge is a Tanzanian poet whose work has appeared as a contest winner in the League of Poets' anthology Songs of Peace: The World's Biggest Anthology of Contemporary Poetry 2020.
****
Make America Love Again
by Mike Quinn
America is back on their civil rights home run
In the land of the brave and the home of the gun
Where a black man is not let catch his breath
We mourn his murder and his unlawful death
The President's dark heart amplified their pain
He's singularly Made America Hate Again
So it's a crime now if your live's black
Will they ever get America's "free" soul back?
George Floyd's "ambulance was his hearse"
While Uncle Sam hosts this Covid curse
The flames of hate are burning brightly now
This matter should Make America Think Again somehow?
Until they bend their collective knee of shame
Can this too begin to Make America Love Again
Mike writes: "I am an Irish person deeply touched by George Floyd's cruel murder and also the deeper Viruses of Hate in America."
****
The Journey
by Mary Brooks
I was brought here many years ago from a distant land, deep in the bowels of a hellbound ship to this unknown land we sailed.
I raised my head to heaven and planted a seed in my heart, then put the rest in a treasure chest where in heaven it might prevail.
Sold on the block like an antique clock whose chimes they dared to sound, then I saw hope die and rise again with thorns upon his crown.
So the antique clock from the auction block could stay its chimes no more and it told of strife and the loss of life on this foreign shore.
I still see God's face in this far off place and his promise still rings true, when darkest night falls down on me Lord I'll remember you.
****
The Human Family
by Alisha Rodrigues
The color of one's skin
does not define the person.
We are all human
and
come from the same source.
Therefore we are all interconnected.
We are a human family
of
brothers and sisters.
Alisha is the Vice President of Artists Embassy International, which sponsors the Dancing Poetry Contest.
****
Civil Rights and Its Role With the Military
by Denise Jones
As an African American retired U.S. Army soldier,
I would like to point out civil rights and its role with the military.
The President and Commander-In-Chief involved
Had the last name Truman and the first name Harry.
The military's integration in the 1950s
Was based on Truman's mandate.
It made it unlawful for the military
To continue to segregate.
Military personnel like the Tuskegee Airmen
Could finally join General MacArthur's ranks.
So to Commander-In-Chief Truman,
I give thanks.
Truman's mandate also opened the door in the 1960s
Where President Lyndon B. Johnson signed various legislation.
This would include the Civil Rights Act of 1964
And the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to prohibit discrimination.
Jones writes: "I am an aspiring black poet who would like to share an unpublished poem in the midst of a grieving and outraged country where black people are still, to this day, victims of systemic racism. In the way that things have been unfolding in recent days, this is definitely a watershed moment for civil rights right now. This poem is to show that there is still hope for black people in the United States."
****
Substack
Substack is an easy-to-use platform to create free or paid-subscription email newsletters. Good for sending out short articles, poems, or blog posts.
Subtropics
Simultaneous submissions accepted for prose but not poetry. Past contributors include Steve Almond, Charles Wright, D.A. Powell, Anne Carson, and Billy Collins. Read editors' preferences on website before submitting. Best for authors with some professional publication credits.
Sun, Moon, Salt
Winner of the 1992 Word Works Washington Prize, this debut collection was reissued in 2010. If this book could be summed up in one word, it would be the title of the opening poem, "Tongue", that place where language and sex meet. White delights in the body's unique shapes, textures, and tastes, inviting us to experience familiar features as strange and wonderful. The generous range of these poems also extends to Northeastern small-town life, the constraints of female roles, and a grown woman's empathetic insights into her parents' struggles.
Sundress Reads
Sundress Publications is a well-regarded small press that runs the Best of the Net award series. Their "Sundress Reads" review series is open year-round to submissions of small press poetry and literary prose books published in the past two years. Editors say, "We hope to champion writers whose work highlights human struggle and challenges misconceptions." Send one PDF by email and one hard copy to Sundress Academy of the Arts.
Sunspot Literary Journal
Founded in 2019, Sunspot Literary Journal seeks to amplify diverse multinational voices. They accept unpublished poetry, short fiction, and creative and journalistic nonfiction. There is a small fee for submissions, but the issues are free to download online. Periodic contests offer prizes around $250-$500 for micro poetry and flash prose. On the other end of the spectrum, Sunspot is willing to read literary prose pieces (stories, long-form stories, novelettes and novellas, ssays, opinions, memoir, travel, reviews) that run up to 49,000 words. Poetry can be up to 1,250 lines.
Superhero Diversity: Improving Diversity in Comic Books
This 2020 article by Brent Moeshlin on the website of Quality Comics, a comic-book store and collectors' resource site in Alabama, gives a useful overview of "firsts" in superhero representation beyond white straight men. (Did you know Batwoman was a Jewish lesbian?) The storylines mentioned in this piece are a good place to start expanding your imagination as a comics creator.
SuperSummary Poetry Writing and Analysis Guide
SuperSummary is an online compendium of plot summaries and study guides for notable contemporary and classic literary works. This page on their website features resources to begin your basic education in poetry writing and analysis. Links include tips for understanding a poem, glossaries of literary terms and poetic forms, and sites with kid-friendly poems.
Survivor Stories: It’s On Us
Survivor Stories is a project of It's On Us, a national movement to end sexual assault, and the group End Rape on Campus. This free online forum offers a supportive space to post personal stories of sexual abuse and trauma recovery. Stories are searchable by theme, gender, and orientation. The site includes grounding activities to help with the emotional impact of reading the stories.
Susan Tepper
Ms. Tepper is the author of DEER and Other Stories (Wilderness House Press, 2009) and the poetry chapbook Blue Edge (Cervena Barva Press, 2006).
Swallow
This chapbook won the 2008 Flip Kelly Poetry Prize from Amsterdam Press. Award-winning poet Ellaraine Lockie says of this collection, "Jendi Reiter's poems are arrows that plunge dead center into the hearts of feminism, religion, death, the interior of mental health and psychotherapy. Her humor and satire here are as sharply honed as her indignation." Email the author for purchasing information.
TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics
TAB: A Journal of Poetry & Poetics is a national and international journal of creative and critical writing. The mission is to discover, support, and publish poems and other writing and art about poetry; to provide a forum in which the poetic tradition is practiced, extended, challenged, and discussed by emerging and established voices; and to encourage wide appreciation of poetry. TAB is part of Tabula Poetica: The Center for Poetry at Chapman University. Print issues appear annually in January; electronic issues are published during the rest of the year. Back issues can be read for free online.
Tablet Magazine’s Pride Reading List for Kids
Tablet is a Jewish magazine of politics and culture. This 2016 article by Marjorie Ingall recommends contemporary books with positive LGBTQ representation for kids, tweens, and teens. As Ingall says, "Teaching tolerance is a Jewish value. And it's never too early to read to your kids about different kinds of families and different identities, and to model why kindness is important. Everyone is created b'tzelem Elohim, in the image of God."
Tachyon Publications
This San Francisco-based small press specializes in science fiction and fantasy, with titles by James Morrow, Thomas M. Disch, Peter S. Beagle, Charles de Lint, and other leading authors in that genre, as well as "steampunk" and "cyberpunk" anthologies.
Taco Bell Quarterly
Not affiliated with the eponymous fast-food chain, this quirky online journal founded by MM Carrigan publishes poetry, fiction, essays, artwork, and comics. Every piece must reference Taco Bell in some way. Editors say, "First and foremost, TBQ is about great writing. It’s about provoking and existing among the white noise of capitalism. We embrace the spectrum of trash to brilliance."
Tales from the Trail
The YouTube channel Tales from the Trail is a growing collection of distinct short videos showcasing original poetry inspired from hiking trails across the United States. If you are interested in writing a poem for Tales from the Trail, you can contact TalesfromtheTrail3@gmail.com.
Tales of the Woodcock
By Julie Irigaray
A picture of me holding a woodcock
my father had freshly shot
takes pride of place in our living room.
What a peculiar thing to let a three-year-old child
pose with a dead bird, and such a majestic one.
But I'm not repelled. I am familiar with
the woodcock's umber and burnt sienna
plumage—I even know her Latin name is
Scolopax Rusticola, that her belly resembles
bandages. I have learned to find the pin feathers,
these delicate striped tears used
by artists as brushes for miniatures.
I spread her wing as one unfolds a moth, trying
not to touch the powder which allows it flight.
I'm not thinking about why her head is dangling:
I just love to caress her coal skullcap. I grasp
the woodcock tightly—my father's most precious
treasure. I don't realise yet that he will neglect
his family to track her down every weekend.
I don't resent her being our rival.
*
A snapshot of the mind: I'm no more than twelve
and my mother cooks woodcocks in boiling
duck fat to preserve them. She offers to prepare me
one for breakfast: I accept but feel embarrassed
as I know she is going to tell her friends
and all the family how good a girl from
the south west I am, eating woodcocks at 9 am:
Such a strong child, a hunter's daughter.
Now I feel guilty when I devour the woodcocks
my father shoots. I love the crack of the beak
when I open it to catch the tongue, breaking the skull
to suck the brain, the succulent taste of what I enucleate.
Then I reflect on this pair of obsidian eyes, always glassy
—the most impenetrable I’ve ever seen. So I make a small
sacrifice by not asking my father to bring me others,
hoping my opposition is of principle, not a rejection of him.
Tanager
By Anna Scotti
There are people who spend this pink hour of dawn walking the perimeters of skyscrapers in Houston, never looking up, gathering birds that have crashed against the great walls of mirrored windows, bewildered by all this broken sky and endless squares of cloud. And there is a Texas man who crosses to Matamoros every morning, stacks of flyers on the cracked seat beside him: La has visto? Missing seven years. They are never coming back, the girl, the years, they are never coming back, the flocks that once darkened the plain wide skies like purple clouds, but there are goldfinch, and warblers, and martins tucked in every tree, nature's secret, until their desperate hallelujah at the orange edge of dawn. Some of the birds are dead and some will die on folded towels in boxes tucked beneath desks or in car trunks, old women's tears wetting the broken beaks, the perfect feathers, but a few will be released to wing again into the treacherous sky. Now the wayward daughter dances for a slab-faced man whose fists bristle with folded dollars, or she washes laundry for beans and oranges, or she has lain at the bottom of a rocky ravine since the morning of the slammed door, since her father's words were spoken; that can't be undone. But here a scarlet-throated bird is cupped in a man's rough palm, a thick finger strokes its bright breast, and in response, a trembling.
Tania Pryputniewicz: Author, Teacher, Tarot Muse
Poet Tania Pryputniewicz is the author of Heart's Compass Tarot. She offers critiques and online workshops that combine ekphrastic poetry, Tarot journaling, and creating visual art.
Tar Sticks to Everything
Stumps pierce a white blanket of snow—winter
in burley country. Three hundred stalks
per row stake and trap
history, which hangs over the country
side before falling
to earth. Autumn draws longer shadows
where a faded tinderbox barn looms—
its broad sides converge into sheet
metal lances aimed at an apathetic sun.
Inside its walls, a year's labor cures,
ten stalks per hickory stick each speared
at the base. As winter nears
the green blood dries and gravity
claims every leaf. Tar gathers dust
from a dark dirt floor. The farmer pulls
a leaf from its stalk, holds it first
to his nose, then to the fading light.
Flaccid. The browning hangs over knuckles
like skin. Dust and tar cover hands
that won't come clean
'til right before planting season.
Time for stripping, bundling leaves. Soon
another year's work auctioned—the weed
will rest in the hands of sinners and cancer
patients. The father closes the barn door
and turns away.
Handwashing. Suppertime.
Behind him thin slats of light peer
through the dead oak boards,
while in the shadows his son cups
palms around an orange tell-tale cherry—
and coughs. The boy allows smoke
filled with pitch to warm his hands.
Copyright 2012 by Allen Gray
Critique by Laura Cherry
Writing poems is often considered to be an effete, elite process, far removed from ordinary folks and "real" work. One challenge to this limited notion of poetry is the work poem, which takes as its subject the unglamorous jobs, the mucking out of the world's stables. The act of writing such a poem can be a reclaiming or celebration of labor, whether it is one's own work, the work of one's family, or work more distantly observed. Capturing some form of work in a poem, particularly manual labor, so frequently marginalized in Western culture, can mean wrestling with all sorts of contradictions.
At the same time, work is an ideal subject for a poem. Jobs often come freighted with rich lexicons of terminology that can be plundered in the service of the poem. Work requires gloriously specific objects and actions. It is vivid even when boring, and it generates stories. Work makes things happen; it makes things. The work poem just needs to open the door to those things and let them in. Allen Gray's poem, "Tar Sticks to Everything", does exactly that.
Gray's poem has an honorable lineage. Perhaps the most renowned "poet of work" is our current Poet Laureate, Philip Levine. Check out his "Fear and Fame" (from his collection What Work Is) for a masterful example of the genre. Levine is by no means alone, though. Other powerful collections dealing with physical labor include BH Fairchild's The Art of the Lathe; An Honest Answer and Hurricane Sisters, by Ginger Andrews (known as "the cleaning lady poet", though she is much more); and Max Garland's The Postal Confessions. The speaker in Susan Eisenberg's Pioneering: Poems from the Construction Site is a woman working in a traditionally male job, doing physical labor. A beautifully poignant example of work poetry is Thomas and Beulah by Rita Dove (see the poems "Straw Hat" and "Dusting"), based on the lives of Dove's grandparents. And for another perspective on work poetry, see "Poems on Work and Money" on the Academy of American Poets website. In addition to what we might call blue-collar poems, there are also many poems based on the plight or good fortune of the office worker (or doctor or lawyer or investment banker), but those will remain a topic for another time.
The work poem often deals with work that is difficult, dangerous, perhaps even morally compromised, and from these conflicts grows the richness and complexity of the poem. A whole subgenre of poetry has been written on the life of the coal miner, for example. Miners are subjected to extreme danger in both a daily and a long-term way. They do work that is demanding and tedious, in the dark, for little money. Historically, they are often mistreated by their employers. Yet there is a fascination, almost a mystique, surrounding the coal-mining life and its struggles. For examples of poetry about coal mining, see Tess Gallagher's "Black Money", Philip Larkin's "The Explosion", and the book Kettle Bottom, Diane Gilliam Fisher's luminous collection of voices from the West Virginia mining wars of 1920 and 1921.
Coal mining is an interesting counterpoint to the subject of Allen Gray's poem, the equally complicated world of tobacco farming. Here is another difficult job with its own rhythms, its own way of life and its own dark side: the physical blight it brings to all it touches.
Grey gives us a beautiful example of a work poem in "Tar Sticks to Everything". The diction Gray uses to describe the materials and activities of the tobacco farm (burley, tar, hickory stick stakes, stripping and bundling leaves) conveys an easy, confident intimacy with the subject: this may not be a familiar place to us, but we sense we are in good hands.
Another thing I admire about this poem is the way Gray moves between concrete and figurative language. In the very first stanza, Gray gives us these lines:
...Three hundred stalks
per row stake and trap
history, which hangs over the country
side before falling
to earth.
Replace "history" and "country/side" with details of the tobacco farm, and you still have evocative, vivid lines. As they stand, the abstractions lift the poem from the beginning to a higher level of discourse, but with ease, almost off-handedly. It takes guts to whip out such abstractions, and to use them without causing the poem to shift off-balance and grow portentous. With his casual tone, and by moving afterwards back to the actual scene, Gray pulls it off, and I'm delighted to see him do it.
In a similar move from bare fact to image, the visually evocative detail, "a faded tinderbox barn looms" is followed by the equally ominous metaphor of "sheet / metal lances aimed at an apathetic sun." The latter image is another breakthrough judgment that works to set the poem's tone. There is little kindness in this landscape, but Gray shows us the beauty in its starkness and the sadness in its danger.
The language throughout the rest of the poem is casual, conversational, describing "the farmer", who is also "the father", checking his harvest as any farmer would do. The detail that "Dust and tar cover hands / that won't come clean / 'til right before planting season" tells us that his crop is as dangerous to him as it will be to those who eventually smoke it.
Gray does so many things right in this poem that I don't have space to detail them all here; in particular, his restraint, and his relaxed control of both the language and the material, make the poem powerful, not overblown. The title is a perfect example of this control, with its plain language but bold statement: this title conveys the poem's important points and establishes its voice. In telling us that "tar sticks to everything", it implicates all of us in the tobacco-growing paradox: the farmer must grow his crop to make a living. Smokers are compelled to buy it. Farm subsidies allow the cycle to continue. Both the farmer's family and the crop's consumers are physically damaged. Morally, the situation is complex and nuanced; from most perspectives, it is tragic.
In only a few places does Gray wobble over the line of restraint into overstatement: the farmer's reflection that "the weed / will rest in the hands of sinners and cancer / patients" seems to cross that line to me. It would be more compelling, and more in keeping with the tone of the poem, to leave at least the cancer patients, and perhaps the sinners as well, merely implied.
More subtly, the dash just after the wonderful image in which "his son cups / palms around an orange tell-tale cherry" gives too much dramatic weight to the subsequent ominous cough. The reader gets the point, that the son himself is doomed by his father's livelihood, and does not need the dash to establish a pause. The light touch Gray uses in the rest of the poem would work well here to get the greatest possible power from these lines.
Finally, a small quibble with a detail that this particular reader finds distracting and confusing: the poem begins with "winter / in burley country" and then moves backward to "autumn", which is then reinforced by the phrase "as winter nears." A simple fix to establish temporal continuity would be to change "winter" in the first line to "fall". That quintessentially American word for the season also puts us in the right spot, place-wise, for all that follows in this quiet and remarkable poem.
Where might a poem like "Tar Sticks to Everything" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
New Letters Literary Awards
Postmark Deadline: January 15, 2021
Prestigious, competitive prize series from the University of Missouri-Kansas City literary journal gives $1,000 and publication for poetry and short fiction manuscripts
Beacon Street Prize
Entries must be received by May 30
Redivider, a literary journal based at Emerson College in Boston, MA, gives $500 apiece for unpublished poems and short stories; online entries accepted
Bridport Prize
Entries must be received by May 31
High-profile British contest awards prizes up to 5,000 pounds for poetry and short stories, 1,000 pounds for flash fiction; online entries accepted
Guy Owen Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: June 15
Long-running award includes $1,000 and publication in Southern Poetry Review, a fine journal that favors rich, imagistic work
Ledbury Poetry Festival Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by July 3
Contest sponsored by UK-based poetry festival awards 1,000 pounds (cash prize added in 2012) and free tuition to a writing course at the Ty Newydd Creative Writing Center, North Wales; no simultaneous submissions
This poem and critique appeared in the May 2012 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Tara
By Catherine Sasanov. This exquisite, penitent chapbook unearths lives overlooked by official histories. Upon discovering that her Missouri forebears had owned slaves, the poet undertook the task of reconstructing the latter's stories from the scraps of information in local records. The incompleteness of the narrative stands as an indictment of white America's lack of care for black lives. Suburban development appears as the latest form of erasure of the graves on which civilization is built.
Tarik Dobbs
Tarik Dobbs is an Arab-American queer poet and visual artist from Michigan. Their poetry chapbook, Dancing on the Tarmac, was selected for publication by G. Calvocoressi (Yemassee, 2021). Read Daniel Lassell's review of this collection in Diode Poetry Journal.
Tattooed Poets Project
Launched in 2009, the Tattooed Poets Project blog features photos of artistic tattoos paired with a poem by the wearer. Some of the tattoos are also portraits of notable poets such as Whitman and Dickinson. Contributors to the site include award-winning authors Kim Addonizio, Kazim Ali, Charlie Bondhus, Joy Harjo, Noelle Kocot, Simone Muench, Carl Phillips, and many others.
Taylor Mali
Poetry slam champion and teachers' advocate Taylor Mali is also a driving force behind the award-winning Urbana Poetry Slam team, which performs every Tuesday night at the famed Bowery Poetry Club in New York City.
TCK Publishing’s List of 100+ Author Tools
TCK Publishing is an independent publishing company specializing in digital marketing. Founder Tom Corson-Knowles teaches online training courses in self-publishing and book promotion. This list compiles over 100 basic tools to write, design, and market your book.
TCK Publishing’s List of Top Kindle Book Promotion Sites
This list ranks the top sites that advertise discounted Kindle e-books to consumers, based on how much traffic they get. The article also includes a link to TCK's companion piece about sites that list free e-books.
Tecfidera
By Tamara Kaye Sellman
I
One. Two. Three. Four. Breathe in. Breathe out. Repeat.
You walk the back road, the trail, the high school track,
take the stairs two by two, arms attuned to hips in motion,
warm, loose and fluid, controlled. Fingers tingle, balance
veers always to the left, your ears filled with tinnitus opera.
The crown of your head tilts, spilling the leftover fairy dust
of chi from the nape of your neck. Always, there is extra,
the spoils of energy gained, then lost in the act of living.
II
The commercial shows a woman who is you, but you are
not an actor. She moves through the acts of her life:
in Spring, striding as a speedwalker; in summer, diving
into the blue of a pool, crawling stroke over stroke to
the other side; then, in the autumn, riding a Ferris wheel
at the county fair. A man in the hovering bench next to her
brandishes the turquoise capsule: Elixir of Tecfidera,
a diamond ring for her to swallow at the top of the carnival.
III
Each dose more than a hundred dollars. Twice a day, every
day. The promise to stay the march of T cells consuming
the memory of muscle, the glimmer of crystalline thought,
the music of speech, all that is you, without discrimination.
You gird yourself with fried eggs, tuna fish in oil, bananas
and peanut butter at every meal to coat your gut so you can
swallow chemotherapy whole, survive its secondary insults
in order to take your walk, climb your stairs, live your life.
IV
Today it is stadium steps, cold gray concrete. Two by two,
breathe in, breathe out. Your body, a metronome tuning
its efforts to thwart the random violence of astrocytes
turned against you, chiseling, faceting, cauterizing both
the white matter and the gray. Moving the body mobilizes
blood factors, strengthens the myelin sleeves of neurons,
feeds oxygen to the factories of the mitochondria, makes
efficiency of glucose so your brain doesn't trip its circuits.
V
The chipped amber paint on the edge of each step evokes
that first week of track season every year in high school.
Shin splints and Icy Hot. Paced breathing to fuel muscles.
This was decades ago, but just last night you dreamed of
running. The air inside your lungs didn't burn. Your muscles
like soft pulled taffy, your gait a weightless dance of
forward motion. Today, you try to run. Footfalls wobble,
threaten to shatter in seconds your contractured ankles.
VI
The promise of a pill. Many tolerate it less than the daily
bee stings administered at one of seven injection sites,
tattoos using needles dripping the ink of recombinant DNA.
You covet your capsule, your personal Hope Diamond.
Three years now, you've since become the pill popper
the small-town grocery clerk disparaged while ringing up
your soy milk. Her cure for everything is your poison, says
your apologetic naturopath. Breathe in, breathe out.
Techno-Orientalism in Science Fiction
Chloe Gong is the author of These Violent Delights (Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2020), a paranormal retelling of Romeo and Juliet set in 1926 Shanghai. In this 2019 blog post, she discusses how to write cyberpunk and dystopian speculative fiction without relying on imagery of Asian societies as unfeeling, robotic, and menacing.
TechRadar Recommends the Best Free Text to Speech Software
This 2018 article from the product review website TechRadar recommends various free programs to convert text to audio files.
Teen-Talk Exchange
by Helene Pilibosian
took Taralee to the drawing board
pretending to be desk.
She abstracted shapes
from theorems of geometry,
held the compass point firm
and turned it like a pirouette,
its trance of triangle
touching at a sharp point
then bouncing toward a rectangle
leaning upon the balance
of a diagonal. Add thirst of line.
Then coloring in was less a fuss,
the third dimension,
the light effects of life,
the ginger stain,
the strawberry rain,
the privilege of trees,
transgressions of berries,
blood of dandelion stems,
legendary encyclopedia of plants,
red ants transporting crumbs,
Armenian blue beads or gabouyd hloun
for luck of color or lack of chance,
circumstances allowing for birds
with prancing feathers—
parrots, peacocks, love birds—
the soft eyes of deer,
mathematical monkeys jumping at trees,
fish exchanging gills like a hobby,
exotic flowers bowing to girls,
magnanimous tomatoes juiced,
oranges diced with skin,
even the slithering of snakes
through the yellowed grass,
the romance of cherry blossoms in spring,
a fling of ripened cherries
along with apples, pears, apricots
and the science of brochures
adding or subtracting every feature.
She framed the drawing with self-expression
and hung it in her room.
Telephone: A Game of Art Whispered Around the World
Inspired by the children's game "Telephone", where a phrase transforms as it is repeated from one participant to another, multimedia artist Nathan Langston invited writers, musicians, and visual artists around the world to create pieces responding to a source text and the other artists' interpretations thereof. Read an article about the genesis of the project in the Sept/Oct 2021 Poets & Writers.
