Resources
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Literary Translators’ Association of Canada
The Literary Translators’ Association of Canada (LTAC) is devoted to promoting the art of literary translation and the interests of the profession. Providing access to literature written in other languages and conveying culture across linguistic lines, LTAC members translate works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama into 20+ languages. LTAC offers contests, workshops, conferences, and an online directory of translators.
Kirkus Reviews: Complete Self-Publishing Guide for Authors
This free 21-page online guide from Kirkus Reviews, a leading book-review publication, walks new authors through their basic options for design, marketing, and distribution of self-published books.
Daily Writing Tips
A monthly membership fee of $10 buys an e-newsletter subscription and access to the Daily Writing Tips archive with hundreds of articles on grammar, style, word usage, and spelling. Articles are grouped by broad category (e.g. Vocabulary or Business Writing) but not easily searchable by topic.
Butterfly Story Collective Podcast
A project of the University of California-Davis, the Butterfly Story Collective is a podcast where immigrants share their stories about their experiences living in the United States. Featured speakers include civil rights attorney Hassan Shibly and actor Bambadjan Bamba from the film "Black Panther".
Saint X
By Caroline Cabrera. Winner of the Hudson Prize from Black Lawrence Press, this poetry collection creatively explores the traumas and strengths of emerging womanhood by "answering" questions from a science textbook in ambiguous and offbeat ways. Later poems about religion shed light on the initially cryptic title, positioning the book as a kind of talkback to the catechism format. The mystery of "X" is an experience to savor, not an equation to solve.
Contemporary Native American Poetry Essentials
At the blog of the literary journal Ploughshares, Dean Rader offers a syllabus for becoming educated about the heritage and future of Native American poetry. The essay includes links to significant poets, presses, and anthologies. Rader writes, "Reading work by Native writers and poets is important for a number of reasons, but at the very least we should be reading Native writing because it helps tell the stories of America’s original selves."
I Forgot, Like You, to Die: 12 Palestinian Writers Respond to the Ongoing Nakba
This 2018 post at LitHub offers a sampling of protest literature by Palestinian writers on the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, the destruction of hundreds of villages and displacement of 750,000 Palestinians when the state of Israel was founded in 1948.
Red Blues
By K.A. Jagai
I
My father was not the oldest,
but he was the brightest
boy and so he was sent first
to America. Despite how far
he crawls from Guyana
he will never scrape the wet
earth roads from his feet,
never scrub his pink tongue
of coolie colloquialism.
When I pass down stories
of a back home I have never seen,
my tongue slips quickly
into Caribbean. My father,
terrified of himself, still says
close the lights and tirty tird.
He is a staunch republican.
He once refused to hire a Trini
temp because she had heard
it hiding behind sharp white
enamel, too. How dare she, he asked
my mother. How dare she?
II
My family came here as
paper sons and through air-
ports requiring cash
in brown paper bags
my mother borrowed to save
a thankless man's brothers.
My mother's hands, a long
fingered daughter of those who fled
burning torches of red
revolution. She did not ask
for much. A loving man. A man
who would give up everything
as her father, and his father before
him, all the way up the chain—
a long line of noble Chinese men.
My mother was born in China-
town. New York City is all
the home she knows. They call
her zuk-sing, empty shell,
Chinese on the outside and
hollow within. She was
gentrified out of Brooklyn last
year—rising rents and Rag
and Bone encroaching, slowly,
slowly, she watches as the stores
filled with pastries and duck
hanging neck-wrung in clouded
windows falls away, replaced
by sleek NYU façades and
rowdy bars. She takes my white
midwestern girlfriend by the hand
and points: Look, there. Do
you see? It's all gone.
III
Here is the beautiful
thing about being a
child bridging worlds
you don't know: the women
are strong in all the same ways,
and yet carry their wrinkles
like maps. Here is where I
fought a brawling student
off with words. He had a cutlass.
I was pregnant, the size
of a planet. I contained the
world and more within me,
and I won. By God, I won.
Here is where I fought a man
who wanted to take from me
what was not his to take. I
was fifteen. Here is the scar
I saw in a young boy's side
left from a knife brawl.
New York was different then.
It wasn't safe for us.
IV
But is it safe for us, now,
I want to ask them.
My mother's missing finger-
tip tells no tales. She is voting
for Hillary. She is sick of white
men ruining everything all
of the time. She wants
a better life for herself.
She does not think of dying brown
children in far-off lands. She is too
fearful for her own son, of his being
shot to care about the abstract.
What do you have against
allies? a white girl asks
in an online forum.
Nothing, I do not say to her.
I have nothing against
your empathy at all.
So You Wanna Write a Black Person
In this blog post from Queeromance Ink, a site for promoting LGBTQ fiction, romance and erotica author Sharita Lira gives advice on writing non-stereotypical African-American characters, from her own experience and that of the romance readers and writers she polled.
Finding Communion in Disability Poetics
In this essay from the blog of the literary journal Ploughshares, poet Lizz Schumer surveys foundational works of the disability poetics movement, and what they meant to her self-concept and aesthetic development. Authors cited include Vassar Miller, Kenny Fries, Jim Ferris, Karrie Higgins, and Sheila Black.
LGBTQ Reads
Dahlia Adler, author of several Young Adult and New Adult novels including Under the Lights, writes this book review blog that spotlights queer-themed fiction for teens and adults.
Narratively
Founded in 2012, Narratively is an online magazine of journalistic features about "ordinary people with extraordinary stories". They publish longform and shortform articles, short documentary films, photo essays, audio, and comics. Narratively sponsors an annual free writing contest with a large cash prize.
Writers’ Workshop of Asheville
The Writers' Workshop of Asheville, NC, offers weekend classes and contests for emerging and experienced writers. Financial assistance is available for low-income writers in exchange for volunteering. The prize in their contests is generally a choice between a stay at their Mountain Muse B&B, free workshops, or a free manuscript edit.
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.
naked arms
By The Poet Spiel
they may be hungry
but they are not cold
they learned first
not to be cold
not to wear a coat
because there was no coat
you see them at grunt work
on hiways on rooftops on farms
you see them pushing snow pushing manure
no coat
like they are not cold
tho you are freezing
everyone is freezing
the old ones survived
the border crossing
determined to tolerate
anything for a penny
just for this opportunity
they could not afford to be cold
their kids' kids' kids still crawl out
from beneath old truckbeds
or plywood lean-tos down at the tracks
to walk to school to learn english
with their faces scrubbed
but without coats
with naked arms
you want to say:
are you hungry
are you cold
tho you know they are not cold
if you gave them your coat
they would not wear it
they do not wear coats
bulk beans or rice suffice
but they are not cold
Girl Flying Kite
By Nancy Louise Lewis. The subjects of this visionary, God-haunted debut poetry collection could not be further from the innocent quotidian scene suggested by the title. In fact, the title itself is our first clue to the menace and mystery Lewis finds beneath the surface of daily life, as it refers to a child victim of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, the shadow of her last playful moments forever burned into the wall. Other poems draw inspiration from the author's Appalachian childhood, stories of father-daughter incest, and enigmatic encounters with a divinity whose presence we can neither completely discount nor rely on. Lewis is most at home in the liminal space between belief and doubt, like the constantly eroding and re-forming shoreline of the ocean that appears in many of these works.
Café Crazy
By Francine Witte. In this tough-minded, bluesy poetry collection, the narrator cuts her no-account alcoholic ex-husband down to size—and curbs her lingering desire for him—by contextualizing their relationship within nature's larger creative and destructive patterns, from forest fires to mass extinctions. "Charley" is just another predator, and not an apex one, at that. Witte's portmanteau words give the poems a distinctive voice and an improvisational quality: bees are "sticky with flowersex", and humans "go along futurestupid", like any other species unable to predict the meteor strike with their number on it.
So You Want to Talk About Race
By Ijeoma Oluo. This manual on contemporary race relations by an up-and-coming black woman journalist should be required reading in high schools and colleges, and is also invaluable for writers to recognize prejudiced tropes in their characters and plots. Using personal anecdotes and examples from everyday life, Oluo liberates essential concepts like privilege, structural racism, and intersectionality from the academic jargon and toxic call-out culture where conversations about racism often get stuck. She neither condescends to, nor coddles the reader, showing vulnerability with stories about her family's experiences with poverty and racism, while maintaining strength and clarity in her demands for justice. Reading this book will make you feel like you've made a new friend who respects you enough to give you constructive criticism.
Queer Indigenous Women Poets at LitHub
Award-winning Mojave poet Natalie Diaz curates this bimonthly feature of selected poems by contemporary queer indigenous women. The first installment includes work by No'u Revilla, Janet McAdams, Lehua M. Taitano, Deborah A. Miranda, and Arianne True.
QUILTBAG+ Speculative Classics
Writer and critic Bogi Takács highlights lost classics of queer speculative fiction in this biweekly column on the website of Tor.com, a leading publisher of diverse voices in sci-fi, fantasy, and horror. Their goal is to counteract the cultural mechanisms of erasure and suppression of minority writing. Takács explains, "QUILTBAG+ is a handy acronym of Queer, Undecided, Intersex, Lesbian, Trans, Bisexual, Asexual / Aromantic / Agender, Gay and a plus sign indicating further expansion." Launched in 2018, the column will feature pre-2010 work either by QUILTBAG+ authors (where this is known) or with QUILTBAG+ themes, with a special emphasis on identities that are less-discussed, such as trans, intersex, asexual, and bisexual writing. Read more of Takács' reviews and critical essays at Bogi Reads the World.
Brain Pickings
This free, donation-supported website curated by Maria Popova collects links to the week's best articles on literature and culture. Sign up for their email newsletter to be notified when new pieces are posted.
Enchanted Lion Books
Enchanted Lion Books is a Brooklyn-based publisher of children's picture books. "Independent and family owned, we love books, well-told stories, and illustrations that open up the visual world and deepen a child's sense of story."
Reedsy on Author Scams and Publishing Companies to Avoid
Reedsy is an online author community that helps writers connect with editors, designers, reviewers, and marketing professionals. This article on the Reedsy blog provides a good overview of literary scams and how to avoid them. Topics include traditional versus vanity presses, warning signs of a scam contest, and finding a reputable agent.
Unruly Bodies
Best-selling essayist and novelist Roxane Gay, author of Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, curated this pop-up online journal in April 2018, featuring 24 contemporary writers' reflections on embodiment and how it is policed by society. Contributors include Kaveh Akbar, S. Bear Bergman, Kiese Laymon, and Carmen Maria Machado.
David Kherdian’s Day Book
David Kherdian is a notable Armenian-American author whose poetry books and memoirs chronicle mid-century immigrant life in Wisconsin and the intergenerational legacy of the Armenian genocide. Taking the form of an online diary, his blog features reminiscences and poems inspired by daily life.
Our Lady of Acid Rain
By Mark D. Hart
With the lime of her body
sweetening the forest floor
in ecstatic effacement,
this plaster Virgin melts earthward,
the body of a woman imagined
free from corruption, safe in heaven,
her virtue like a stored cask.
Mold now greens the bulk of her,
taking her back, once all-white,
church-pure, immaculate.
Blurred, eroded by the sour tears
of an exhausted sky, her face
like ours someday.
A half-teepee of stone slabs shelters her
on a spur off the main trail.
Clearly others have found her,
depositing evidence of devotion—
various seashells, a candle
that spattered the rock with wax,
a rosary, a perfect red maple leaf,
pine cones, coins.
Originally published in the McNeese Review, nominated for a Pushcart Prize
Write an Artist Statement People Will Want to Read
Grant applications, gallery exhibitions, and other competitive opportunities may require you to write an "artist statement" about your work. This article from the Massachusetts Cultural Council's blog explains the salient features of a successful artist statement. It should be brief, polished (no typos), offer a "way in" to understand your choice of materials and themes, and be consistent with the unique voice or mood of your art.
The Business of Being a Writer
By Jane Friedman. The expert publishing blogger teaches writers about the economics of their industry in this book from the University of Chicago Press. The book is intended to help writers craft a realistic plan for earning money from their work.
The Romance Novelist’s Guide to Hot Consent
In this article on the feminist sexuality website Jezebel, six successful romance writers discuss the importance of building consent into your scenes of seduction and intimacy, and how to write it in a way that feels natural and appealing. This piece is a must-read for fiction authors in all genres.
The Handy, Uncapped Pen
Founded by Jennifer Ruth Jackson, The Handy, Uncapped Pen is a blog and online community for neurodivergent and disabled writers. The site includes interviews, resources, mentorship opportunities, and articles on current issues in the literary community. They pay $3 for guest posts.
Transcending Flesh in Fiction and Fantasy
Queer fantasy writer Ana Mardoll, author of the Earthside series, discusses how to acknowledge the existence and needs of transgender people when creating a fictional world that includes widespread access to body-modification techniques. This piece was published on xer Patreon page (a platform to support content creators with recurring donations); a complete book of essays on the topic is also available for download on a pay-as-you-wish basis..
Give ‘Em Enough Rope
By Des Mannay
Out of the mouths of babes
into the minds of morons
Why should her words of praise
be taken as a come on
Why can't she dress just to please herself
rather than desperate you?
You're an empty wasted shell
who should be locked up in a zoo
Why can't you admire the form
without trying to fuck the contents?
Don't think your bravado storm
will hide your impotence
Why should she lock herself away
just to save your stupid pride?
Only free to roam at day
till the pillow where she cried
How come your behaviour is allowed
whilst she becomes the victim
Let her voice rise and shout aloud
of the pain you are inflicting
Put yourself in the woman's place
and turn around and then
Find yourself staring face to face
at yourself in the lion's den.
Then senile old judge
will say that she deserves it
With nods and winks and then a nudge
and justice once again perverted
If you think kitchen, child and home
is woman's only station
Then you'll sink just like a stone
and set the stage for your own castration
Scott Woods Makes Lists: Black Children’s Picture Books
Scott Woods Makes Lists is a librarian's blog about African-Americans in popular culture, literature, and current events. This list and its 2016 precursor recommend children's picture books with black protagonists "that aren't about boycotts, buses or basketball". Woods says he wanted to showcase stories outside the familiar civil rights narrative, "featuring Black children doing what all children do: play, make up stories, learn life lessons, and dream."
Onym
Onym's reference site collects resources to help you generate catchy and appropriate names for fictional characters, places, or products. In addition to the usual dictionaries, thesaurus, and baby name lists, Onym includes profession-specific glossaries (e.g. legal, nautical, and mathematical terms), historic slang, world mythology, and random word generators. (However, political sensitivity and avoiding cultural appropriation are up to you.)
IBPA Hybrid Publisher Criteria
The Independent Book Publishers Association released these guidelines in 2018 to help small presses adhere to best practices, and to assist authors in distinguishing a legitimate author-publisher cost-sharing model from a vanity press. IBPA's Hybrid Publisher Criteria require that hybrid publishers behave just like traditional publishers in all respects, except when it comes to business model. Hybrid publishers use an author-subsidized business model, as opposed to financing all costs themselves, and in exchange return a higher-than-industry-standard share of sales proceeds to the author. In other words, although hybrid publishing companies are author-subsidized, they are different from other author-subsidized models in that they adhere to professional publishing standards. IBPA's standards include a competitive editorial selection process, high-quality book design, distribution services, and respectable sales figures.
CRAFT Literary Magazine
CRAFT is an online literary journal exploring the art of fiction. They publish contemporary short stories accompanied by the author's notes on technique. Other features include book reviews, writing exercises, and a summer conference. CRAFT is open to submissions of flash fiction (1,000 words maximum) and short fiction (7,000 words maximum) year-round, and also offers contests on occasion.
Inside/Out
By Joseph Osmundson. This daring flash memoir, which can also be classified as a prose-poem collection, looks from multiple angles at the arc of an emotionally abusive relationship between the white author and his African-American ex-lover. Like a mosaic of broken mirror fragments, each sliver of memory reflects larger themes of exclusion, power exchange, personal and collective trauma, and the nature of intimacy, raising as many questions as it answers.
Don’t Call Us Dead
By Danez Smith. "Every day is a funeral & a miracle" in this award-winning poet and performance artist's second collection, a defiant record of life as a black gay man under the twin shadows of police violence and HIV. The pervasive image of blood links these poems and the boys, alive and dead, for whom Smith speaks: blood as kinship, as bearer of the memory of dangerous intimacy, as evidence of murders that white America wants to wipe away. Smith's honors include a Lambda Literary Award and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship.
3arabi Song
By Zeina Hashem Beck. Winner of the 2016 Rattle Chapbook Prize, this Lebanese poet in exile keeps her heritage alive through lyrical tributes to famous singers of the Arab world. These multi-lingual poems weave together phrases in English, French, Italian, Arabic, and the new hybrid language Arabizi, a creation of the younger generation to represent Arabic sounds in English-character text messages. These poems are hopeful elegies, political dance tunes, nostalgic manifestos.
Trip Wires
By Sandra Hunter. With startling breadth of vision, this short story collection reveals the raw and tender material of our common humanity across borders—from a Sudanese refugee in Glasgow, to the survivor of a Colombian paramilitary kidnapping, to young soldiers in the Middle East whose emotional armor is breached by defiantly joyful children. The standout tale "Brother's Keeper" channels Flannery O'Connor to expose the underside of white Christian benevolence toward Africans. For immigrants and wanderers everywhere, gratitude takes a backseat to homesickness, and rescue is not the same as safety. Hunter restores these displaced persons to the center of their own life story.
The Art of Invisible Movement
Maggie Stiefvater is the New York Times bestselling author of the Raven Cycle series and other award-winning fantasy and magical realist novels. In this blog post, she advises fiction writers to make the same scene accomplish more than one task. For instance, a quiet, transitional scene does not have to be filler; it should reveal something important about backstory, character, or atmosphere. The key to good pacing is to use a variety of scene structures: earn those quiet moments by interspersing them with higher-energy action.
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.
Charley Says Give Me Your Heart
By Francine Witte
It is gentle,
and I want to know it.
First thought is run,
but I've been alone
so many months.
I stretch
my arms to see
if they still reach
another human being.
And they do.
Charley says
put out the light
and he swoops down
with a force
even time
doesn't have.
I'm a young girl
compared to the Earth,
and I've seen animals
shred each other's skin
in the name of hunger,
the one crime everyone forgives.
Next morning, light
tears me up like a canine tooth.
I am alone,
although Charley is here.
He turns to me,
and simply says give me your heart.
It is mine now
and later
I might
want it.
Readerly Privilege and Textual Violence: An Ethics of Engagement
In this 2017 essay from the LA Review of Books blog, widely published poet and critic Kristina Marie Darling advises reviewers how to be mindful of privilege and subjectivity when critiquing a poetry book, particularly one by a less-established author. She warns against inferring psychological or autobiographical details from authors' published work. The essay contends that the best reviews are those that situate the book in its own aesthetic tradition and point the book toward the audience most likely to appreciate it.
Honeysuckle Press
Brooklyn-based Honeysuckle Press is a small literary press affiliated with Winter Tangerine Review. Their mission statement says they are "committed to expanding and redefining human truths by prioritizing the narratives of unsung communities." The press accepts queries year-round for full-length poetry collections and short story collections, and also offers a free contest for prose and poetry chapbook manuscripts.
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.
Guide to Finding Your Published Poems at the Library of Congress
Have you had a poem published in an amateur or "vanity" poetry anthology, which you would like to find again? The Library of Congress website gives you tips and links to start tracking down your poem in various reference archives, as well as advice for avoiding contest scams.
Best and Worst Self-Publishing Services Rated by the Alliance of Independent Authors
The Alliance of Independent Authors maintains this Watchdog service that rates dozens of self-publishing services based on price, distribution channels, book design quality, and ethics.
OneLook Dictionary Search
OneLook is a search engine that aggregates word definitions from over 1,000 dictionaries. There is also a reverse dictionary search function, in which you can enter keywords to describe a concept, and get back a list of words and phrases related to that concept.
Redheaded Stepchild
The biannual online journal Redheaded Stepchild only accepts poetry that was rejected by other magazines. During the months of February and August, submit 3-5 unpublished poems that have been rejected elsewhere, with the names of the magazines that rejected the poems. They do not want multiple submissions, so please wait for a response to your first submission before you submit again.
