Poetry Press Week 2016 in Miami-- an exciting new way of presenting your poetry!

I am one of the judges!

From Poetry Press Week's site:

Poetry Press week is currently accepting submissions from South Florida poets for our 2016 show at the O, Miami Festival, April 22-23.

We are honored to have three distinguished poets who will select invitees from the submissions pool:
John Brehm is the author of two books of poems, Help Is On the Way and Sea of Faith, and the associate editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry. His poems have appeared in POETRY, The Southern Review, New Ohio Review, The Sun, Prairie Schooner, The Writer’s Almanac, and many other journals and anthologies. He teaches for Mountain Writers Workshop and Literary Arts.

Ashley Toliver is the author of IDEAL MACHINE (Poor Claudia, 2014). Her poems have appeared in Caketrain, Front Porch, PEN America and Third Coast, among others. A Cave Canem graduate fellow, she currently lives in Portland, Ore.

Beatriz Fitzgerald Fernandez is the author of Shining from a Different Firmament (Finishing Line Press) which she presented at the Miami Book Fair International this year.  Her poems have appeared in Boston Literary Magazine, FLARE: The Flagler Review, Label Me Latina/o, Verse Wisconsin, and Writer’s Digest, among others.

Submissions for Poetry Press Week at O, Miami close January 31.

Those who can't write....submit!

The past few months have not been very productive for me, poetry writing-wise, so I'm taking advantage and concentrating on submitting my backlist of poems.  Some of my best haven't been published because they need particular markets which I haven't found yet (or haven't been invented yet!)  Well, that's my take on it,anyway!

It's one way to stay productive in those sparse writing months--no one can publish it while it's sitting in your computer!  And waiting for acceptances is excruciating, so you want to have a constant rolling submission rate to ensure the flow of acceptances is a stream (or at least a trickle!) and keeps you encouraged.

Somewhere I read that if you are a writer who needs encouragement to write, then you can forget about being a writer!  But that's a little harsh, don't you think?  Everyone needs encouragement; sure, there are writers like Emily Dickinson who write in isolation but even she sought out encouragement--that she didn't receive as much as she deserved is another thing.  Genius is often not rewarded in its own age, but most of us aren't geniuses, so we can expect some encouragement, I hope!

I've been receiving acceptances on a regular basis, at least one a month for a year now, and I am waiting to hear from five or six journals/contests right now.  In late May I heard from Spellbound that they accepted The Coqui Prince, my Puerto Rican Frog Prince fairy tale adaptation poem (Whew! That's a mouthful!) for publication in their special anthology edition.  I'm very happy to be included in that!  This poem flowed out very naturally and is based on memories of my father's country house in the hills of Puerto Rico.

I have now passed the criteria (which does not include publications in children's poetry magazines, by the way, which I think is a shame, since writing for children is much more difficult than for adults!  But they were very prompt in adding some journals that were not listed in their publications list, so I can't complain!) to be listed on the Poets & Writers directory, click on my name to see my listing:

Beatriz Fernandez