SUBMISSION SUPPORT GROUP
Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo
Enrollment limit: 8 students
$200 new; $175 returning
The submission support group is back by popular demand! Participating writers will meet weekly online to focus specifically on sending out their work for publication or other literary opportunities with Women Who Submit co-founder Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo. There will be no written assignments beyond 1) prepare to submit, 2) submit, and 3) support the other people in the group as they submit. During your time together, you'll pool your knowledge of literary journals and magazines, agents, small presses, contests, and other calls for submission. The group will also discuss how to stand out in the slush pile and what makes for a successful query letter, book proposal, and residency application. The first two submission support groups have produced over a dozen acceptances or recognitions so far, including poetry, fiction, and photography publication, a nonfiction book contract, performance on a podcast, and honorable mention by Daniel Handler.
This group is open to writers of all genres and levels, as long as they are prepared to actively submit their work over the course of the term. The meetings will be held online in real time using the Zoom platform.
Online
Saturdays
12:00-1:00 pm
July 7 to September 8 (with no class on July 21 or September 1)
Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, a first-generation Chicana, is the author of Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge (Sundress Publications, 2016). A former Steinbeck Fellow, Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange winner, and Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grantee, she’s received residencies from Hedgebrook, Ragdale, National Parks Arts Foundation, and Poetry Foundation. Her work is published in Acentos Review, CALYX, crazyhorse, and American Poetry Review among others. A dramatization of her poem "Our Lady of the Water Gallons," directed by Jesús Salvador Treviño, can be viewed at latinopia.com. She is a co-founder of Women Who Submit and a member of Macondo Writers’ Workshop.
Reviews of Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge
"I am moved by Xochitl-Julisa's work, her embrace of familia, of places long gone and present, of abandoned things too, near or in a neighborhood house yet filled with luminous power as a 'black lava molcajete,' a 'mano,' and many kinds of cacti-enduring, inscrutable, fierce, & makers of nectar. Perhaps her verses are gazing at the border-crosser-perhaps at you and me. I found joy in Bermejo's work, her caring journeys, places I have traveled. Her touch is that of an artist. Unique, light, and expansive in its humanity. Bravissimo, Xochitl-Julisa!" —Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of the United States
"Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo's poems rattle the heart, jolt the mind. Moving from the 'tender emerald bites' of nopales shared around a table to the brutal desert terrain crossed by immigrants, she interrogates the intimate and the political. Inventive, glimmering with Spanish, her language punctures silence and makes visible resilience. Her language is also curious; it's shaped by the work of Georgia O'Keeffe and Frida Kahlo, and it cruises through the city of Los Angeles. These poems weren't written to provide solace. These poems will break you in a thousand beautiful ways." —Eduardo C. Corral, 2011 Yale Younger Poets Prize winner for Slow Lightning
"Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo's poems are a haunting vortex from Mexican America, detailed with the items we share, the stories, the names, the old country memories, and also deserts, many, many deserts. Her voice is formidable, her language clear and complex at the same time. Here's a millennial poet that goes beyond the millennium." —Luis J. Rodriguez, Poet Laureate of Los Angeles and Founding Editor of Tia Chucha Press