Resources
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Free Music Archive
Free Music Archive has a large library of royalty-free music clips (up to 15 minutes long) that are searchable by style, mood, pace, instrumentation/vocals, and more. Good for book trailers.
Royalty Free Music by Bensound
Bensound offers a wide variety of short instrumental music tracks in styles such as acoustic, electronic, pop, jazz, and world music. The clips are free to use as background for YouTube and social media videos, such as book trailers. More extensive broadcast uses require a paid license.
Purple Planet Music
Purple Planet Music is an online collection of background music clips in various styles, written and performed by Chris Martyn and Geoff Harvey. The site is easy to search for the musical mood that you need for your book trailer. There are free and paid tiers, depending on the audio quality you need and how widely you plan to broadcast the music.
Zapsplat
Zapsplat offers hundreds of free sound effects and music clips to download, sorted by style, with helpful short descriptions for every clip. The musical tracks are generally 1-3 minutes long, appropriate for a book trailer video.
Paper Cat Press
Paper Cat Press is a curated online collection of opportunities for animators, illustrators, comic creators, and writers. They publish a Weekly Roundup e-newsletter (also available to read on the website) that includes upcoming literary contests and submission calls.
QueryTracker
Available in both free and paid premium versions, QueryTracker features a searchable database of 1,500 literary agents and a record-keeping system for organizing your queries.
Pub Rants at Nelson Literary Agency
Pub Rants is a blog where agents from Nelson Literary Agency offer advice on improving your manuscript and query letter, finding and evaluating an agent, and marketing various genres.
Manuscript Wish List
Manuscript Wish List is an online database of agents and editors, with information on what they're currently seeking. The site also has a podcast and blog with craft articles.
The Fifth Dimension
By Mary K. O'Melveny
There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.
...Leonard Cohen
As I was talking to my friend, he broke
down in tears, recalling anew, that his
wife had recently died. Is gone. Today,
some telemarketer asked to speak to
my long dead mother. For one tiny tick
of a clock, I almost handed her the phone.
How do we navigate shape-shifting grief
and still make coffee in the morning,
exchange words with neighbors about the
sorry state of our televised world or look out
our windows to gauge if promised rain
might fade to something akin to mist?
Surely, it is in those split seconds when
memory's failure blots out bereavement,
when we step forward into some state of
transcendental mercy when yesterday
is restored. A slant of sunlight on snow.
Before the unthinkable had time
to be thought. Before we had to
don mourning garments or speak in past
tenses. Our ground solidifies.
A conversation continues. A smile
returns. We want to stay there,
liberated from known dimensions.
Naked (for the women of Salem)
By Jennifer L. Gauthier
Naked lately—
flayed over fire
innards exposed indisposed
to tell my secrets
to those who wait.
Called to testify amplify verify the very part
that hides itself away inside.
Bartholomew knew the fate that
I can't escape
To skin the truth off the lies to try
To skim the oil from the water
As it slews in circles across the surface.
Roiling, my brain buzzes with bitter words
Biting back the worst when they threaten to slip through the slit
That gapes in my face.
Naked later—
Stuffed with stones sinking
Into the dank underbelly of the stream
screaming through the current wetly
with a witch's wail.
Caitlin Kunkel’s List of Humor and Satire Websites
Caitlin Kunkel is a writer, editor, and teacher of humor and satire. In this Medium post from 2020, she shares links to reputable humor-writing sites that accept submissions and pitches, with brief guidelines and examples of the work that they publish.
The Twin Bill
Launched in 2020, The Twin Bill is a handsomely illustrated online quarterly that publishes poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction about baseball. Editors say, "We celebrate the rich history of the game while also recognizing its vibrant present through essays, fiction, poetry, interviews, and visual art. We welcome writers of all levels and experiences."
Alliance of Independent Authors: Ultimate Guide to Winning Book Awards
This 2021 post on the Alliance of Independent Authors website offers detailed advice on finding worthwhile contests for your indie or self-published book, including an interview with Winning Writers editor Annie Mydla, a screener for our North Street Book Prize.
African Poetry Digital Portal
A project of the African Poetry Book Fund at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the African Poetry Digital Portal is a resource for the study of the history of African poetry, providing access to biographical information, artifacts, news, video recording, images and documents related to African poetry from antiquity to the present.
Modern Manuscript Format Guide
Speculative fiction writer William Shunn (An Alternate History of the 21st Century: Stories) demonstrates the elements of a professional-looking manuscript submission. Mouse over the highlighted text sections of his template for an explanation of each element and why it's needed.
Halloween
By Sue Gerrard
As lockdown winter approaches and the sun
pulls down its shutters earlier and earlier each night,
I wonder what shapes the trees will take in
the dimming twilight. In early evening mist would
they be bare limbed, open armed, wind kissed,
welcoming and giving comfort in the cold?
Or would their leaf stubbled boughs, gnarled
and old strike down to grab me and turn me over?
Would the autumn air be mellow and filled with
plaintive birdsong that tells us autumn is retreating?
Or would the air be quiet, conversation isolated
within the owners’ ears, their lives shuttered
away as day after day is stolen from them
by the pervading silence of separation?
The leaves turn as the virgin white pages
of my diary turn...
Empty, my plans unmade, my future uncertain
and I wonder if it will snow before
this lockdown winter comes.
MetPublications: Free Art Books Online
MetPublications, the book and catalog shop of New York's famed Metropolitan Museum of Art, has made over 600 books available to read online or download, with full text and illustrations.
BlackFacts
BlackFacts is an online portal for Black history and culture, offering a searchable historical database, video profiles of important figures and events, and a current events newsfeed drawn from over 160 news sources in the UK, US, Africa, and the Caribbean.
Where to Publish Flash Nonfiction and Micro-Essays
This 2021 article from the website of Erika Dreifus, poet and editor of the writers' resource newsletter The Practicing Writer, lists more than 50 reputable literary journals that publish short-form creative nonfiction.
HELD Magazine
Edited by MFA students at the University of Guelph in Ontario, HELD Magazine is an online journal of writing and visual art that explores "how all systems are interconnected, interdependent, and ever-evolving." See website for themed submission calls. Because "HELD is a platform for contributors to explore the realities and systems that have shaped them," writers and artists from marginalized populations (Black, indigenous, racialized, disabled, LGBTQ or 2-Spirit) comprise at least 70% of each issue.
ctrl + v
Named for the keyboard command for "paste", ctrl + v is a biannual online journal that publishes artistic collages of words and images. Editors say, "All forms of collage—digital, scissor-and-glue, mixed media, fabric, sound—are encouraged + adored. We are particularly interested in what happens when fragments of language move through the space of other materials."
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.
SelfMadeHero
UK-based independent literary publisher SelfMadeHero specializes in graphic novels and visual narratives. Their catalog includes graphic novel versions of classics such as Pride and Prejudice, Don Quixote, and Victor Hugo's The Man Who Laughed; graphic biographies of notable figures such as George Orwell and Agatha Christie; and original illustrated fiction and nonfiction.
E-book Design Tips from Podia
This article from 2020 gives a user-friendly overview of design principles to make e-books more readable and engaging, from font choice to graphic and multimedia elements. Author Cyn Meyer is a content marketer for Podia, a platform for creating online courses, digital downloads, and membership websites.
Embracing Our Differences
Embracing Our Differences is a nonprofit in Sarasota, FL that hosts an annual arts festival and offers lesson plans and educational resources "to expand consciousness and open the heart to celebrate the diversity of the human family."
Two Medicine Lake
By Cris Mulvey
Walking onto the frozen lake
beneath these chiseled mountains,
snow puff-powdering the purple air,
ravens rustling by, carrying light
like a drink in the curve of their backs,
the ragged cry of their cackling
deepening the thrum of silence:
I am a pine seed stuttering
onto a stainless platter,
the air around me
the color of bluebirds’ feathers
twirling into an ocean of sky.
Route 66 Blues
By David Olsen
Outside Tucumcari the road is straight and flat.
I fix the needle on 65 and drive west. The cool
desert night lingers into the dawn, so I roll down
the side window and rest my arm on the ledge,
as Dad used to do. My contrail of dust swirls
through roadside sagebrush and tumbleweeds.
The radio station fades to static, so I tune to another
with the same twang of heartbreak and regret.
News breaks seem irrelevant here. It starts to get hot,
so I crank up the window, thank the Almighty for A/C.
Most of the time, there's no car ahead or behind.
Just me. I could acquire the habit of solitude here.
Beside the road there's a pickup truck with no tires;
it just sits there, corroding itself to a rusted hulk.
Road signs are perforated with bullet holes.
A faded billboard hypes nutritious Wonder Bread.
The sign for a store has a four-digit phone number.
I'll need gas soon, but the first station I come to
has old glass-top pumps and ethyl posted at 35.9¢.
Ahead there's a diner and gas. After I fill up,
I wipe bug splats off the windshield and grille.
A sign in the window of the diner says Lucky Lager,
and I'm thirsty. Hungry, too. The dyed-blond gal
behind the counter is 40-something, has a smoky voice.
She passes my order of burger and fries to the cook,
opens a beer, slides a bottle of ketchup along the counter,
and says to call her Lil. I leave a good tip, and drive on.
Before the interstate, this land had no limits, but now
everything has moved on into the salmon sunset.
After a while I come to a motel with peeling paint
and no cars in the court. A flickering neon sign
says Vacancy. I pull in. My sciatica's acting up.
I'm not as young as I used to be, but then,
neither is anything else. Time to call it a day.
Sezer Raises His Open Hands
By Carey Link
inspired by Leyla Emektar's photograph, Sezer's Diary
In the twilight of afternoon sun,
Sezer sits in his wheelchair,
and waits to catch a basketball—
as it glides
back-and-forth—forth-and-back—
between earth and sky.
Creature Conserve
Creature Conserve is a nonprofit founded in 2015 by zoologist Dr. Lucy Spelman to bring together scientists, artists, and creative writers to create compelling stories about protecting endangered animals and habitats. Read an article about them in the July/August 2021 issue of Poets & Writers. They offer writing scholarships, workshops, and other programs dedicated to collaboration between science and storytelling.
Élan
Élan is an international print and online literary magazine that publishes original fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, screenwriting, plays, and all kinds of art by creators aged 14-18. Their site design is very artistic.
Paper Lanterns
Based in Ireland, Paper Lanterns publishes poetry and short fiction aimed at teens and young adults, as well as book reviews and feature articles about young adult literature. Authors aged 13+ are welcome to submit. See website for submission periods and formatting guidelines. This is a paying market.
Mayweed
By Frannie Lindsay. Winner of the 2009 Word Works Washington Prize, this spare and radiant poetry collection centers on acceptance of loss. Its key figures are a beloved sister who died of cancer, and their late father, a perpetrator of incest.
The Malevolent Volume
By Justin Phillip Reed. This award-winning Black queer poet's sophomore collection gives a furious and brilliant voice to the shadow side of literary classics from Homer to Plath. The syntax of this poetry collection is thorny and twisted, and the word choice demands slow re-reading to discern the full meaning and appreciate the muscular rhythm. Reed is fond of using words that could be either nouns or verbs, placing them in such a way that you would mistake one for the other until the context becomes clear. One could see this style as a political choice in keeping with the book's passionate reclaiming of Blackness as an aesthetic. Reed is asserting that he deserves the reader's close attention. He is as important, and as intellectually accomplished, as the writers in the white literary canon that these poems deconstruct with wicked cleverness.
New Kid
By Jerry Craft. In this engaging and important middle-grade graphic novel, Black 7th-grader Jordan Banks is transplanted from his Washington Heights neighborhood to a mostly white and rich prep school in Riverdale, where he uses humor and cartooning to process the challenges of making new friends and coping with microaggressions from students and teachers.
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
By Toni Morrison. This slim volume of three essays is adapted from lectures that the celebrated novelist delivered at Harvard in 1990. She asks an incisive question that will turn your traditional high school and college reading material on its head: how was the presence of a subjugated Black population a necessary foil for the development of an American literary identity of innocence, rugged individualism, and white masculinity? Rather than debating whether Twain and Hemingway should be "cancelled", so to speak, Morrison is more interested in what all texts can tell us about whiteness as a self-concept. In that way, even (or especially) problematic representation of Black characters is valuable to illuminate occluded power relations, for a key feature of whiteness is that it positions itself as universal, as the absence of race.
Balloons Lit. Journal
Balloons Lit. Journal is an English-language online journal based in Hong Kong that publishes creative writing and art for readers aged 12-16. BLJ particularly invites submissions from schoolteachers familiar with this age group. Editors say, "We prefer something that is surprising, explosive, unforgettable, extraordinary, mind-blowing, humorous, bold, unique, layered, witty, educational, original." Read back issues on the website to see their taste.
Magic Dragon
Published since 2005 by the nonprofit Association for Encouragement of Children's Creativity, Magic Dragon is a quarterly magazine featuring art and creative writing by children aged 12 and under.
Greek Fire
By Stuart Jay Silverman
Family failings. It is too much, or almost,
to have to put up with, with it, or them,
the archetype of them being Odysseus,
almost before the Greeks were Greeks,
before the Romans took over, and the rest,
to whom it was all Greek, anyway.
He was on his way, a touch impatient,
you might imagine, delays a tiresome
consequence of travel, sea monsters,
lotus eaters, sirens tempting as a two-day pass,
the seas a constant torment what with the sea god
spanking the monkey underwater, and what a monkey!
the size of Polyphemus puffed with pain
that time, oh you remember, the stake
sharpened and rolled in the blistering embers
until the point grew hard as bronze
and he sent it sizzling into the socket
of that fish eye, his shoulder heaving,
his hands rolling it like a spit,
the giant twisting up onto his knees
his throat torn open with the howl.
He saw by the fire a gobbet of gore
shake free to sputter like sheep fat
thrown to the gods, a sacrifice.
But what of she who waited, her
propensity to wait her only failing,
playing the woman part dangerously.
How she put the suitors off, Homer
makes much of, the wife who preserves
her honor and his, a match in cunning
to him, the fabric of her deception,
but what of it? They were a bunch of louts,
looking for an easy lay, her juices
untapped for a double decade, if rumor
had it right, the house their object,
of course, though she wasn't bad for
her age, worth a hump now and then.
In the night, as they say, and so on.
Meanwhile, there was the scar by which he
proved his being, and the bow unbent/
unstrung by the rabble infesting the hall,
its gut he hooked easily to the notch,
and the faithful hound that, despite
twenty years of wear and tear—fleas,
burs tangling his fur like wool torn
from the loom, the comings and goings
at all hours, the beggarly rags worn by the
stranger—still knew him and thumped
his tail in recognition, good doggy—
not to mention, but I must, the braggart
who'd whined and begged table scraps
and thought the stranger an easy mark,
but learned his error the hard way.
What of the neighbors? what did they
make of the usual shouts from the house
in Ithaka rising into screams, then cut
off, the dying whimper bubbling away?
They all fade into background, and
the poets fade who made the man over,
Dante sending him to hell, Tennyson
grafting him an English tongue and a
worldview worthy of an English lord,
Walcott and Kazantzakis breaking the
mold, new-fashioning the crafty hero,
all fade, and the fadings fade, and the
light rises like smoke from the pages
again and again and again, weaving
the mantle by which we lend to our
stumbling feet the semblance of gods.
VCU Medical Literary Messenger
VCU Medical Literary Messenger is Virginia Commonwealth University's twice-yearly online journal of creative writing about medical themes. The journal aims to promote humanism and the healing arts through prose, poetry, and photography.
of dementia nonsense before departing
By Simon Peter Eggertsen
my grandmother licks at a dried red peach,
thinks of her life still and the rust crush of age.
distracted by the jumble of weakened sense and memory:
she tastes the delicate blade of a gray winter knife
shave through the dense white matter of summer light;
she smells the prismed edges of sugary autumn sand
slip from the dull languor of blue summer dew;
she sees the glee of a thousand green spring wisps
chase away the doubt of black autumn shadows;
she hears the red-fire frenzy of a summer morning sky
subdue the cold aquamarine hues of winter-splayed 'cicles,
she feels the yellow veneer of a spring wind merry-go-round,
glaze into the orange haze of autumn's plumes;
she re-senses, without knowing, the color and order of her seasons.
A Place to Dream
By Shobana Gomes
I found a place to dream,
It was a long time ago,
In an illusory setting, masking the clouds,
Where trees were leafless,
As they had fallen on the ground.
I found a bridge to another realm,
It brought me to a never-ending path to freedom,
Where no one could hurt me,
Or torture my kindred soul,
Where I met dreamers like me in quietude.
We talked and we laughed,
We shared and we loved,
We were in a secluded spot away from the prying multitude.
Have you heard of loneliness amongst a million?
Amongst a million-distracting vision,
A stilled mind can find the solitude of peacefulness,
And there I reside,
Most of my life in seclusion.
I found a place where my heart resides in stillness,
It is a quiet place among the trees leafless,
Where the surroundings are deep in mysticism,
For dreamers.
There is love, no hurt,
There is joy, no sadness,
There awaits someone for someone.
Graphic Policy
Graphic Policy is an online journal featuring news and reviews for comics fans, with an emphasis on mainstream properties. The site includes TV episode recaps, movie reviews, creator interviews, podcasts, and reviews of comics in various genres (manga, indie, webcomics, action/superhero, and more).
The Comics Journal
An online publication from comics press Fantagraphics, The Comics Journal features in-depth history, creator interviews, and reviews of comics and graphic narratives.
SOLRAD
A publication of Fieldmouse Press in California, SOLRAD is a nonprofit online literary magazine dedicated to the comics arts. SOLRAD publishes comics criticism, original comics, essays, interviews, and features new, underrepresented, and otherwise marginalized creative voices, in addition to the work of well-established cartoonists, critics, journalists, and authors.
Celan at 100
This 2021 feature in the magazine Jewish Currents commemorates the centennial of the birth of Paul Celan (1920-70), with translations of his poetry and prose by Pierre Joris and multi-genre responses to his writing by poets such as Anne Carson and Peter Cole. Also included are a translation and essay on Rose Ausländer's poem "To Life", from which Celan drew the famous image of "black milk" in his Holocaust poem "Todesfuge" (Deathfugue).
JJ Peña
JJ Peña (he/they) has won prizes for flash fiction from Blue Earth Review, Cutbank, and Mythic Picnic, and serves as a flash fiction reader for Split Lip Magazine.
Aesthetic Generator
This fun program on the website of informatics student Claire Purslow generates descriptions of niche styles that you can try out in your creative writing. Is your fictional character a "retro dad", a "futuristic skeleton", a "slime overlord", or something else that no one has ever seen before?
Fantasy Map Generators and Worldbuilding Tools
This 2021 article from BookRiot recommends 10 websites and software programs that create fantasy maps with detailed terrain. Great for speculative fiction writers and role-playing gamers.
Illypsis Poetry: Amina Jordan-Mendez
Amina Jordan-Mendez is a poet, spoken-word performer, and activist in Western Massachusetts. She was the 2019-20 Straw Dog Writers Guild Emerging Writer Fellow. She says, "Much of the intellectual property of Afro people has always been storytelling, poetry, song. I write for my soul. I teach for my heart. In my curriculum I strive to invite young people of color into poetry, wellness, spiritual health, advocacy, radical accountability."
Mount Island
Mount Island, a print and digital annual journal, accepts creative writing and art from authors who identify as LGBTQ+ and/or POC and who currently live in or hail from a rural area.
