Hi Friends! Tomorrow is Hayward Lit Hop 2023! https://haywardlithop.com/

I'll be hosting two groups of readers for this event:

- Women Who Submit: Bay Area Chapter at The Dirty Bird Lounge at 5:00pm with readers Dera R Jones Williams, Karma Bennett, and Joyce E. Young

- East Bay Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers at The Bistro at 6:00pm with readers Vanessa MacLaren-Wray, Author, Sibyl Saint, Caitlin Dwyer, and Sophie Green

Hayward Lit Hop occurs Saturday, April 22nd from 2-8pm on Earth Day and National Poetry Month. Conceived and organized by volunteer community members, Hayward Lit Hop is free for all ages. The Hayward Lit Hop celebrates our active and dedicated literary scene.

The event begins at 2 pm at Heritage Plaza Park, across the street from the Downtown Hayward Public Library, with a welcome from Hayward local civic and literary leaders and a musical performance from the East Bay Symphonic Band. At 3pm, Hayward-area Poet Laureates' read with East Bay teens. As it's Earth Day, the reading will have a nature and ecology theme. Local environmental organizations will set up tables in the Plaza to promote their work, as well.

From 4-7 pm, we'll hop to different venues up and down and near B Street to with spoken word performances including the AfroSurreal Writers Association, students from Chabot College, a bilingual Spanish/English reading, the Queer Writers, local Horror Writers' and Mystery Writers' Association chapters, the Peer Writers' Group, Women Who Submit Lit, the East Bay Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers, the California Writers' Club, and students from CSUEB and Hayward Unified School District K-12 students.

Readings will occur at local venues including Aranea's Craft Studio, the Sun Gallery, the Odd Fellows Lodge, The Bistro, Dirty Bird Lounge, the Pizza House, The World Famous Turf Club, Yoga Sociale. Hayward Lit Hop concludes with an afterparty at the Sun Gallery where there will be music, food and drinks. The gallery features a climate art exhibit.

This event showcases local businesses, celebrates Hayward's diverse cultural scene, and allows people to meet their neighbors and hear and see each other's talents. We’re here to help people with an interest in writing or art find local groups to support and foster their talents.

A detailed schedule will be posted at https://haywardlithop.com/. Hope to see you there! I'm looking forward to hanging out in our fun downtown all day long.

The WWS Submission Conference is a one day, online event on Saturday, August 8, 2020, beginning at 10 am PT. I'll be appearing on the panel entitled "Empowering your Community: A Talk with WWS Chapter Leads" at 2:15 pm.

This is a topic near and dear to me, as I'm a strong supporter in the importance of writer communities for keeping up motivation and perseverance in a writer's career. To that end, I have been a chapter lead with Women Who Submit (WWS) for the past few years, running one of their Bay Area chapters.

What's WWS? Well, they are the hosts of this conference and a national organization devoted to empowering women and nonbinary writers by creating physical and virtual spaces for sharing information, supporting and encouraging submissions to literary journals, and clarifying the submission and publication process.

If you fit those criteria: a writer who identifies as a woman and/or nonbinary, you are welcome to attend this free conference! Tickets will be limited to 100 participants, and registration closes on Thursday. You can register by completing this Google form. Here's the schedule for the conference!

• 10am-11am: New Member Orientation with WWS Director, Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo
• 11:15am-12:15pm: Demystifying Top Tier Submissions with Cynthia Guardado, Anita Gill, Hazel Kight Witham, moderated by Lituo Huang
• 12:15pm-1pm: Zoom Lunch
• 1pm-2pm: Magazine and Journal Editors Share Best Practices with Cassandra Lane, Raina León, Muriel Leung, moderated by Ramona Pilar
• 2:15-3:15: Empowering your Community: A Talk with WWS Chapter Leads Desiree Kannel, Rebecca Gomez Farrell, and moderated by Ashaki M. Jackson

I am so excited for this conference! I love watching WWS expand its outreach, as it has done over the last several years. The more of us getting our worked published, the better! And supporting each other through the often disheartening submission process is one way to do that.

I'm so thrilled that "What Scattered in the Wind" is reprinted in the Accolades anthology from Women Who Submit Lit. The anthology launches today at the AWP conference in San Antonio.

"What Scattered in the Wind" first appeared in Little Letters on the Skin, a chapbook/anthology (more info here). It's a flash fiction horror tale of an older woman who wakes to find unwanted, and long forgotten, visitors to her isolated desert mesa.

What makes this reprint so special is that Accolades is a celebration of the submissions, acceptances, and publications of members of the national Women Who Submit Lit organization, of which I run a local chapter.

Every other month, I spend two hours submitting out my work for publication and encouraging other writers to do the same. Accolades is proof of how effective that support and time investment is, as all the works featured within it are reprints of writing WWSL members have had published elsewhere -- all that perseverance pays off!

Accolades is available in print from Amazon for $15. Here are the leading lines into "What Scattered in the Wind":

Hollow rasps of laughter pestered her to wakefulness. Any noise would have done the same, though she clamped her eyelids together in protest. For years, Ruth had heard nothing but the teakettle’s hiss or the slow scrape of her cane against the camper’s floor panels. The creaking sound of her voice rarely interrupted the silence. Unlike the other wayfarers, Ruth had never developed the habit of talking to herself. She didn’t care to hear what she’d have to say.

“Hee-hee, hee-he-heee!“

And a photo to set the mood: