By Kapua Iao
From 2020 to 2023, Yellow Arrow Publishing has had the privilege of publishing 11 poetry chapbooks. In 2020, we released our first two chapbooks: Smoke the Peace Pipe (Roz Weaver) and the samurai (Linda M. Crate). Learning how to navigate the world of single-author publications and getting to know the authors was truly rewarding. Roz and Linda were and are fantastic writers and fantastic women. In 2021 we published three more incredible collections, No Batteries Required (Ellen Dooling Reynard), St. Paul Street Provocations (Patti Ross), and Listen (Ute Carson). And in 2022, as we formalized our chapbook submissions process, we had the privilege of working with three local, Baltimore authors with their collections The most beautiful garden (Nikita Rimal Sharma), when the daffodils die (Darah Schillinger), and What is Another Word for Intimacy? (Amanda Baker). This year, we found three more amazing poets who published Lifecycle of a Beautiful Woman (Ann Weil), Black girl magic & other elixirs (shantell hinton hill), and released last month, Swimming in Gilead (Cassie Premo Steele).
With 2024, we wanted to spark and sparkle and made some changes to our submissions process. First, we opened submissions to not only poetry chapbooks but also creative nonfiction and hybrid chapbooks. And second, we added a sliding scale fee so that we could better support and promote our authors while remaining accessible to all writers. We are thrilled to use the fees collected to pay our 2024 chapbook authors and to give a stipend to our creative director, Alexa Laharty, who designs each of our beautiful covers.
In two rounds over several months, we read through the beautiful submissions we received, first creating a longlist, then shortlist, and eventually selecting the three authors we would love to publish in 2024. It was difficult to email submitters to let them know our decision (writing an acceptance email is as hard as a decline as you never know how either message will be received), but the process is done, and we are so excited to work with the three chosen.
So, without further ado, let’s meet the 2024 Yellow Arrow chapbook authors!
Isabel Cristina Legarda
Beyond the Galleons
coming April 2024
Isabel Cristina Legarda was born in the Philippines and spent her early childhood there before moving to Bethesda, Maryland. She holds degrees in literature and bioethics and is currently a practicing physician in Boston. She enjoys writing about women’s lived experience, cultural issues, and finding grace in a challenging world. Her work has appeared in America Magazine, Cleaver Magazine, The Dewdrop, The Lowestoft Chronicle, Ruminate, Sky Island Review, Smartish Pace, Qu, West Trestle Review, and others. Find Isabel on Instagram and Twitter @poetintheOR.
Beyond the Galleons is a meditation on Filipino experiences of colonization, language conflict, loss of homeland, finding footing in new homes, ancestral connection, family, alienation, cultural agility, and the ghosts that haunt people living in geographic or psychologic diasporas. The poems within contemplate longing and resilience, and the need to hold fast to memory even while moving forward beyond pain. It is Isabel’s hope that this small collection can become part of the diasporic voices and joined multicultural histories that are not currently so well known or talked about.
What sparked your interest in writing?
Reading! My elementary and middle schools had wonderful libraries and librarians, and my parents actively modeled and encouraged a love of books, so I contracted bibliophilia at an early age. My father also recited poetry by heart, not infrequently, and between that and the word-centered liturgical traditions I grew up with, I was surrounded by reverence for language. Finally, I was fortunate to have had teachers who helped me find ways to channel some of that love of words and story into creative writing pretty early. (Thanks, Mrs. Riederer, for the journals you made us keep!)
What sparked your interest in Yellow Arrow Publishing?
When I found Yellow Arrow’s website, I was immediately drawn to [its] woman-centered ethos and active valuing of underrepresented voices. I felt a real sense of writerly community reading through the blog posts and the .Writers.on.Writing. section. I was also so impressed by the quality of work showcased in the journal. Yellow Arrow felt like the kind of safe space so many women writers are looking for.
Candace Walsh
Iridescent Pigeons
coming July 2024
Candace Walsh is a PhD candidate in creative writing at Ohio University. She holds an MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson College. Recent/forthcoming publication credits include for poetry, Sinister Wisdom, Vagabond City Lit, and HAD; for fiction, The Greensboro Review, Passengers Journal, and Leon Literary Review; and for creative nonfiction, March Danceness, New Limestone Review, and Pigeon Pages. Her craft essays and book reviews have appeared in Brevity, descant, New Mexico Magazine, and Fiction Writers Review. She coedits Quarter After Eight literary journal. Find her on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @candacewalsh.
Queer love, so often mischaracterized, contains multitudes. The poems within Iridescent Pigeons represent it in romantic, maternal, filial, platonic, symbiotic, erotic, and sylvan modes. They also hold love and loss in cupped hands. We are mortal; so is love. We have life spans; so does love, whether measured in dog years, golden anniversaries, or the number of hours of a tryst that will expire at dawn. Amid the loss, retrieval and rebirth stir within the included poems that inhabit and annex traditional and endangered forms, such as a [William] Wordsworthian ode, an homage to Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty,” a cento composed of phrases from Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, and a triptych of Sapphic stanzas.
What sparked your interest in writing?
Before I could read and write, I scribbled in a marble composition notebook and proclaimed it writing. In first grade, I asked my teacher for an “empty book” so I could write a story in it and illustrate it. My guess is that listening to and reading stories sparked my interest in writing; my mother read to me every night from birth on. I wonder if architects, as children, look at buildings the way I looked at books: without a barrier between the object and one’s admiration, enjoyment, and the desire to create. A thread that has unspooled alongside me my whole life is at the root of writing as resistance: to make an indelible record of what has been ignored, diminished, gaslighted, or stonewalled in the form of conversation—or seems too volatile to say aloud.
What sparked your interest in Yellow Arrow Publishing?
I happily stumbled across Yellow Arrow’s call for submissions when I was researching poetry chapbook publishers while procrastinating finishing my novel. One of the best things about being a writer is that you can procrastinate very fruitfully if you put that energy toward another writing project. I also noticed a sense of readiness in the poems—that they were talking to each other and would be amplified in each other’s company. Yellow Arrow’s mission of supporting women-identified writers and honoring poets’ voices really landed with me, as I hold those values dear as well.
And, after receiving [the Editor-in-Chief] Kapua Iao’s wonderful, dream-come-true email, I learned that one of my dear friends and writing colleagues, Cassie Premo Steele, is also one of Yellow Arrow’s authors. I published Cassie’s gorgeous essay “Pregnant with Myself” in Greetings from Janeland: Women Write More About Leaving Men for Women (2017), a Lambda Literary finalist. Cassie and I are both queer women writers who are also mothers. We have a special bond.
I didn’t want to marginalize my mother self as a poet any more than I’d want to marginalize my queer self as a poet, and I feel so affirmed that Yellow Arrow Publishing enthusiastically accepted Iridescent Pigeons in an iteration that unabashedly reflects the ways motherhood and mother love are muses.
Julie Alden Cullinane
Ghosts Only I Can See
coming October 2024
Julie Alden Cullinane is a poet, author, neurodivergent, and mom in Boston. Her first publication was a poem in The Boston Globe at age 8; she has been writing ever since. After raising a family and working full time for many years as a young mom, she was able to return to her graduate studies later in life and earned her master’s in 2021, during the pandemic. Under the guidance of many amazing and supportive female professors, she began submitting her work for publication. She has published poems and short stories in 20+ literary magazines since 2020. She currently works in academia full time when she is not writing. Julie’s focus of writing is often on the untold seasons and shades of a woman’s life. She loves to highlight the dichotomy of the modern pressures on women and mothers, between having a successful career and an expected perfect domestic life. Her favorite writers are Eavan Boland and Anne Enright. When she is not writing she enjoys long naps on the couch with her beloved dog. She is currently knee-deep in a midlife crisis. It takes up all her time. She will definitely be writing about it. Find Julie at julie.wildinkpages.com/poetry or on Instagram or Threads @HerLoudMind and Twitter or Blue Sky @AldenCullinane.
Ghosts Only I Can See is a look back into the past, present, and future of women’s lives. It focuses not on literal ghosts, but the ghosts of our former selves as we navigate the world as women. Growing up in a world filled with many amazing, strong women, I was an avid spectator of their lives, their passions, and their trauma. Only when I was older and began experiencing life myself did I realize the tender weaving of women’s lives and the multitude of shared experiences that often do not get told because of societal shame and the pressures of perfection put upon them. But women have universal yet intimate experiences that are better understood when shared, which is why this collection of poetry and creative nonfiction peeks back in time to my younger self, the ghosts through time that only I can see. Ghosts Only I Can See unites and shares the painful and wonderful experiences of what is means to be a modern woman.
What sparked your interest in writing?
As a woman in the literary world and the real world, I am trying to tell my stories about the personally felt struggles that are uniquely experienced by women of all ages, colors, shapes, sizes, and economic backgrounds. As modern women, we often strive to do it all, have a career, be a great mom, be healthy and thin, be a good spouse, be a writer and a friend. The limits as well as the expectations put on women are exhausting, confusing, and rarely exposed in literature. I feel these stories often don’t get told because of fear of shame of not being perfect. In my chapbook, I examine many pivotal moments in a woman’s life that often get overlooked. Women who are going through postpartum depression, women who are grieving, women who are fighting their own bodies, and women who love, think, and are passionate. Living in the world as a grown woman is such a beautiful, colorful, and often heart-wrenching experience, reading each other’s stories about shared experiences with existence, pain, and love can only unite us and make us stronger. This is the ultimate goal of putting my stories out into the world. To let women know they are not alone in all the magnificent, strange, and painful things that happen in their lives.
What sparked your interest in Yellow Arrow Publishing?
I was immediately drawn to the message that Yellow Arrow believes in and posts on its website. Their support of woman-identifying authors and under-represented female voices perfectly aligns with the stories I am trying to tell in my chapbook. As I was looking for a press to send my work to I couldn’t have found a better fit for submission than Yellow Arrow.
We can’t wait to work with Isabel, Candace, and Julie next year but would like to acknowledge all the incredible collections we received in the summer. In particular, we would love to give a shout out to both our longlisted (part of the top 20) and shortlisted authors (part of the top 10).
Meet our shortlisted authors:
Elizabeth Crowell
Michele Evans
Laura Foley
Pauline Joyce Lacanilao
Francesca Moroney
Lore Nissley
Beth Oast Williams
Meet our longlisted authors:
Keidra Chaney
Nicole Friedman
Jessica Gregg
Wendy Kagan
Inna Krasnoper
Thomasin LaMay
Kathryn Paul
Amanda Russell
Terry Sann
Shizue Seigel
Thank you to everyone who took the time to send your words to us. Every writer has a story to tell and every story is worth telling. We are so proud of everyone we publish at Yellow Arrow.
Yellow Arrow Publishing is a nonprofit supporting women writers through publication and access to the literary arts. You can support us as we SPARK and sparkle this year: purchase one of our publications from the Yellow Arrow bookstore, join our newsletter, follow us on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter or subscribe to our YouTube channel. Donations are appreciated via PayPal (staff@yellowarrowpublishing.com), Venmo (@yellowarrowpublishing), or US mail (PO Box 65185, Baltimore, Maryland 21209). More than anything, messages of support through any one of our channels are greatly appreciated.