The Best of the Net recognizes the work of writers published online by independent presses. The project was started in 2006 by Sundress Publications to create a community among the online literary magazines, journals, and self-publishing platforms. The award represents an incredible opportunity for Yellow Arrow Publishing to further showcase and support our authors. Our staff is committed to letting our authors shine. Every writer has a story to tell and every story is worth telling.
Here are our Best of Net nominees from Vignette AWAKEN for 2023. You can find some of our authors reading from AWAKEN on the Yellow Arrow YouTube channel.
L.M. Cole
“Lately I’ve Been Talking Too Much”
I, an object, shattered into fragments,
am searching for the phrase
that nobody would understand
but you, who have listened with
patience to myself in fractals of light and perspective
L.M. Cole is a poet and artist residing on the U.S. East Coast. She is the coeditor of Bulb Culture Collective and a poetry reader for Moss Puppy Magazine, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Bitchin’ Kitsch, The Pinch Journal, CLOVES, Stanchion, Defunct Magazine, and others. Her debut poetry chapbook SALT MOUTH MOSS QUEEN (Alien Buddha Press 2022) is available on Amazon. Find her on Twitter @_scoops__ and on her website poetlmcole.com.
L.M. was also one of the contributing authors of Vignette SPARK with her poem “Just Make Art, They Say.” You can find an interview between L.M. and Melissa Nunez from earlier this year at yellowarrowpublishing.com/news/interview-nunez-cole.
Maggie Flaherty
Awake! Awake! The closer
I look, the more I see this earth—
this present moment—burning.
Where’s a gust of healing rain,
a soothing wind that lifts
or sets us down gently?”
Maggie Flaherty began writing poems in high school but stopped for a busy 50 years or so. In 2016, after retiring, she attended a workshop taught by the poet and essayist Lia Purpura at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. There, her interest in poetry returned like a homing pigeon. In 2020, she graduated from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University with a master’s in poetry. These days, she works in the garden or watches the birds. That’s where many of her poems begin: in the always-changing weather.
Kerry Graham
Nudging my door open, I step into, on, among stillness. My eyes wander within the room’s four walls, where my lovelies and I will make another year’s worth of memories, magic, mistakes.
Kerry Graham is a Baltimore-based writer, book coach, and former high school English teacher. Her newsletter, Real Quick, is a monthly glimpse into her writer life. Kerry is a Creative-in-Residence at The Baltimore Banner.
Nancy Huggett
“I Am Full of Milk and Walking”
To make things right.
I stride,
eyes bright from sleepless nights
and this thin slice of freedom
Nancy Huggett is a settler descendant who lives, writes, and care-gives in Ottawa, Canada, on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg people. Thanks to Firefly Creative, Merritt Writers, and not-the-rodeo poets, she has work out/forthcoming in Braided Way, Event, Five Minute Lit, Intima, Literary Mama, Pangyrus, Poetry Pause, Prairie Fire, Reformed Journal, (RE) An Ideas Journal, and Waterwheel Review.
Janice Northerns
But what has never faded is the piercing grief I felt that first visit when I stumbled into the kitchen in that predawn dark and discovered the bowl, the spoon, the oatmeal—the simple morning still-life my mother had laid out for my father. And with it, my realization that he was dying.
Janice Northerns is the author of Some Electric Hum (Lamar University Literary Press, 2020), winner of the Byron Caldwell Smith Book Award from the University of Kansas, the Nelson Poetry Book Award, and a WILLA Literary Award Finalist in Poetry. She grew up on a farm in rural West Texas and holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Texas Tech University, where she received the Robert S. Newton Creative Writing Award. Other honors include a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a Brush Creek Foundation writing residency, and a Pushcart Prize nomination. She lives in Kansas and is currently working on her second book, a hybrid collection of poetry and essays inspired by the life of Cynthia Ann Parker.
Shikhandin
. . . .But you are alive still. And so
is time and breath and your jam-jarred dreams. All
it needs is a flick of your wrist to open.
Shikhandin is the pen name of an Indian writer. Books include After Grief – Poems, Impetuous Women, Immoderate Men, and Vibhuti Cat. Honors include, runner up in the George Floyd Short Story Contest (2020, United Kingdom), Pushcart Prize nominee by Aeolian Harp (2019, U.S.), Pushcart Prize nominee by Cha: An Asian Literary Journal (2011, Hong Kong), winner of the 2017 Children First Contest curated by Duckbill in association with Parag, an initiative of Tata Trust, first prize in the Brilliant Flash Fiction Contest (2019, U.S.), runner up in the Erbacce Poetry Prize (United Kingdom), winner of the 35th Moon Prize (Writing in a Woman's Voice: USA), first runner up in the The DNA-OoP Short Story Contest (2016, India), second prize in the India Currents Katha Short Story Contest (2016, U.S.), first prize in the Anam Cara Short Fiction Competition (2012, Ireland), longlist in the Bridport Poetry Prize (2006, United Kingdom), and finalist in the Aesthetica Poetry Contest (2010, United Kingdom). Shikhandin’s prose and poetry have been widely published in India and abroad in online and print journals and anthologies. Her speculative novella, The Woman on the Red Oxide Floor, is forthcoming in 2023–2024.
Katarina Xóchitl Vargas
There are 25 million
slaughtered ancestors in my genes.
When the withering starts
they spill into my veins all at once:
ancient danzantes with phantom limbs—
feet stomping, ankles rattling,
reawakening my Earth with ayoyotes
Katarina Xóchitl Vargas (she/her) is an emerging Xicana poet, originally from Mexico. After her family moved to the U.S., she began composing poems to process alienation. A dual citizen of the U.S. and Mexico, today she writes resistance poetry and lives on occupied Tsenacommacah territory where she is working on her first chapbook. Katarina is the first-place recipient of the inaugural Mulberry Literary Fresh Voices Award. Her poems first appeared in Somos en escrito: The Latino Literary Online Magazine, Cloud Women's Quarterly Journal, The Acentos Review, Penumbra, and Barrio Panther. Follow her on Instagram @Cantos_de_Xochitl.
Ann Weil
. . . .I still feel
the warmth of his arms, the heat between us
that made three new lives, the burning gut that knows
the pain of shared complicity. Love can melt
even as our fingers grasp for it.
Ann Weil writes in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and on a boat off Snipe’s Point Sandbar, in Key West, Florida. Her most recent work appears in Maudlin House, Pedestal Magazine, DMQ Review, 3Elements Review, The Shore, and New World Writing Quarterly. Her chapbook, Lifecycle of a Beautiful Woman, published by Yellow Arrow Publishing, debuted in April 2023. See more of her work at annweilpoetry.com.
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