Yellow Arrow Publishing Blog
Meet the 2025 Yellow Arrow Publishing Best of the Net Nominees
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 the Net 2025 nominees from Vignette SPARK. You can find some of our authors reading from SPARK on the Yellow Arrow YouTube channel. Best of the Net announces the winners in January.
Angela Acosta
Angela Acosta (she/her) is a bilingual Latina poet and an assistant professor of Spanish at the University of South Carolina. She is a 2022 Dream Foundry Contest for Emerging Writers finalist, 2022 Somos en Escrito Extra-Fiction Contest honorable mention, and Utopia Award nominee. Her work has appeared in Panochazine, Pluma, Toyon Literary Magazine, and The Acentos Review. Her creative and academic work centers on imagining possible worlds and preserving the cultural legacies of women writers. She is the author of Summoning Space Travelers (Hiraeth Publishing, 2022), A Belief in Cosmic Dailiness (Red Ogre Review, 2023), and her forthcoming chapbook, Fourth Generation Chicana Unicorn (Dancing Girl Press, 2024).
Tijanna O. Eaton
“And Her Eyes Fell from the Scale”
creative nonfiction
Finally, animated by their generous and generative support, the chapter was complete. The ouroboros had uncoiled fully, metamorphosing into a dragon.
Tijanna O. Eaton (Tə-zha-na; she/her) is a Black poly kinkster queerdo pocket butch with a high school diploma and a rap sheet. She has been published in Honey Literary, Noyo Review, Panorama Journal (nominated for a Pushcart Prize), and Yellow Arrow Vignette SPARK. She received the 2021 Unicorn Authors Club Alumni award, was a 2023 Rooted & Written Fellow, and was the 2024 Best of the Net nonfiction judge. Tijanna is board chair of Five Keys Schools and Programs, served on QWOCMAP’s board from 2016 to 2018, and was IMsL’s POC liaison from 2015 to 2017. Visit bolt-cutters.com for more information.
Marisa Victoria Gedgaudas
“Colygraphia”
poetry
. . . . The syrupy seduction of believing that I can be a keeper of stories but not the teller of them.
Marisa Victoria Gedgaudas is a writer originally from Colorado who now lives on the windswept bluffs of northern California. She is most inspired by the wild beauty around her and is often found exploring the mountains of her childhood, the unspoiled Pacific coast, and the desert landscapes in between. She is currently working on her first collection of poetry.
Charlene Langfur
“The Way Back”
poetry
. . . steady
or true, a time to rebuild a small world
that works when I am trying to put
myself back together this way
in time . . .
Charlene Langfur is an LGBTQ and green writer and an organic gardener living in the very hot, southern Californian desert. She was a graduate fellow in the Syracuse University Writing Program and her most recent publications include poems in Poetry East (the special Monet edition), The Hiram Poetry Review, London’s Acumen, and The North Dakota Quarterly.
Laurel Maxwell
“A Full Life”
poetry
. . . . To fold ourselves like a paper crane into the creases of delicate existence.
Laurel Maxwell is a poet from Santa Cruz, California, whose work is inspired by life’s mundane and the natural world. Her work has appeared at baseballballard.com, coffecontrails, phren-z, Verse-Virtual, Tulip Tree Review, and Yellow Arrow Vignette SPARK. Her creative fiction was a finalist for Women on Writing Flash Fiction Contest. She has a chapbook forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2025. When not writing Laurel enjoys putting her feet in the sand, reading, traveling, and trying not to make too much of a mess baking in a too small kitchen. She works in education.
Katherine Shehadeh
“My son wants to know what happened before the universe &”
poetry
today we learned the universe was created by fire—an explosion tinier than a tiny pin prick, and the universe, it’s expanding all the time, stretching this way, pulling that, until a moment when it isn’t and it gets smaller & tighter, until it turns back into a tiny little thing, tinier than a pin prick.
Katherine Shehadeh is a poet, artist, and current reader for Chestnut Review who resides with her family in Miami, Florida. Her recent poems appear in Maudlin House, Drunk Monkeys, Saw Palm, and others. Find her on Twitter @your_mominlaw or Instagram @katherinesarts.
Ann van Wijgerden
“Dear Planet”
poetry
. . . . But it was the waters captivating me in aqua hues, light scattering diamantine, undulating surfaces, their expanses exhaling, inhaling, exhaling.
Ann van Wijgerden, born in the United Kingdom, has spent most of her adult life in the Netherlands and the Philippines. She has had nonfiction, poetry, and fiction published (or accepted for future publication) in a number of magazines and anthologies, including Genre: Urban Arts, Orion, Orbis, The Sunlight Press, Last Stanza Poetry Journal, Yellow Arrow Vignette SPARK, The Wild Umbrella, and the Queen’s Quarterly. Ann cofounded and works for an NGO called Young Focus (youngfocus.org), which provides education for children living in Manila’s area of ‘Smokey Mountain.’
Veronica Wasson
“On Clothing (Five Pieces)”
creative nonfiction
Clothing was the most visible manifestation of what I was and what I wasn’t; of who I wanted to be and who I dreamed of becoming.
Veronica Wasson (she/her) is a trans writer living in the Pacific Northwest. Her work has appeared in Spectrum, smoke + mold, The Seventh Wave, Yellow Arrow Vignette SPARK, and elsewhere. You can find her work at veronica-wasson.com.
*****
Yellow Arrow Publishing is a nonprofit supporting women-identifying writers through publication and access to the literary arts. You can support us as we AMPLIFY women-identifying creatives this year by purchasing one of our publications or a workshop from the Yellow Arrow bookstore, for yourself or as a gift, joining our newsletter, following us on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, or subscribing 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.
Meet the 2023 Yellow Arrow Best of the Net Nominees
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
“Tacoma”
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
“Reminder”
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
“Something Like Love”
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
“Epiphany”
. . . .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
“The Ills of Invasion”
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
“The Unraveling”
. . . .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.
*****
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.
Igniting a SPARK: Yellow Arrow Vignette Submissions Now Open
By Siobhan McKenna
Welcome to the first day of open submissions for Yellow Arrow Vignette! Now in its second season, Yellow Arrow Vignette is an online creative nonfiction and poetry series developed to better feature women-identifying writers and share their voices beyond Yellow Arrow Journal and our single-author and collaborative publications. In 2022, the inaugural season of Vignette on the theme AWAKEN, authors meditated on the spaces where the unknown comes into light. The poetry and prose published last July through to September awakened us to the shape our love can take for a parent who we didn’t see eye to eye with, the healing power of carrying on ancestors’ legacy long suppressed by colonialism, and the beauty in the “glowing yolk” of a sunset as it slides into the ocean among many other stories.
This year, submissions for Vignette are open from May 1 to 31 and will align with the 2023 Yellow Arrow yearly value: SPARK.
SPARK
: to set off in a burst of activity
: someone or something that ignites an idea
The German novelist and philosopher, Thomas Mann said, “If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.”
What notion or thought has you reaching for your pen or keyboard?
How do you keep that idea or spark lit when faced with interruptions that tell us creative work is frivolous or a luxury rather than a necessity?
From whom or what do you harness your inspiration to maintain your spark? In strangers on city sidewalks, blooming sculpture gardens, daily WORDLE rituals, in the words of fellow writers or ?
Through the guiding theme of SPARK, we invite you to reflect on what ignites your creativity and how you see that reflected back as you move throughout your daily life.
After assembling a collection about awakening, I love that SPARK is our 2023 yearly and Vignette theme as it is a natural next step. An awareness can only lead to a certain point; then there must be an inciting action to propel an idea into being. Yellow Arrow board president, Mickey Revenaugh, spoke of a spark earlier this year as “a precondition, necessary but not sufficient.” When an idea arrives, sparks are vital—they are the lifeblood for creativity. Yet, sparks sometimes fade when it comes to the nitty-gritty, the long hours that must be undertaken in order to have an idea come to fruition. It is then, within the drudgery of labor, when faced with self-doubt and fear (who even wants to hear what I have to say?), that it is essential to remember the spark that drove you to begin your journey.
I’m also fond of SPARK because of the word’s sensory associations. When I think of a spark, I hear the sound of July nights when the fizzing hum of a lit firework shoots into the sky and erupts with a loud crack. I feel the heat on my fingertips from the fleeting flame of a matchstick. I see the pyrotechnic emissions from a sparkler marking the end of a wedding reception and smell the smoky mix of burnt residue rising into the air. I’m just not sure of what a spark tastes like—although Pop Rocks, the fruity flavored popping candy, could be similar to tasting a spark: a frenetic tap dancing on my tastebuds. Yes, perhaps that’s it.
No matter what you conjure when you think of SPARK, I hope you are encouraged to find that impulse behind your work and submit to Vignette! With the pieces in this issue, we want to nudge each other into remembering the reasons for crafting emotions from letters and symbols; the motivation for sharing a slice of worldview that is wildly different from another’s and still, resonates in our core.
For Yellow Arrow Vignette 2023, we are looking for creative nonfiction and poetry by writers who identify as women on the theme of SPARK. Submissions can be in any language as long as an English translation accompanies them. For more information regarding submission guidelines and how to submit, please visit yellowarrowpublishing.com/vignette/submissions. Make sure to read the guidelines carefully before submitting. If you have any questions, send them to submissions@yellowarrowpublishing.com. Vignette will publish two pieces each week beginning on July 3 and ending with our authors coming together for a reading on September 6.
We look forward to reading the submissions for Yellow Arrow Vignette and sharing these stories with you. Since its founding in 2016, Yellow Arrow has worked tirelessly to make an impact on the local and global community by advocating for writers that identify as women. Yellow Arrow proudly represents the voices of women from around the globe. Creating diversity in the literary world and providing a safe space is deeply important. Every writer has a story to tell, every story is worth telling.
*****
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.