Submission Call

[ A Request from Poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers]


Dear Folks:

I am guest-editing a special black women's issue of the journal PMS: Poetry, Memoir and Story, to be published in Spring 2008. The issue will feature poems, stories and memoirs by black women writers, both established and emerging.

In case you haven't heard about PMS, it's a great little journal with (a funny name!) dedicated to all women's literature, edited by Linda Frost, and published out of University of Alabama at Birmingham. PMS is pretty unpretentious, but despite that, in just seven short years, PMS has published such writers as Ruth Stone, Carly Sachs, Remica L. Bingham, Allison Joseph, and Natasha Trethewey. And the journal has received several accolades as well: A reading “pick” by the Small Press Review; poems included in Best American Poetry 2003 and 2004; a story included in New Stories from the South 2005; memoirs included in Best American Essays 2005 and 2007; and a memoir included in The Best Creative Nonfiction 2007. In addition, work from PMS has also received special mention for the 2005 Pushcart Prize and work has been included on former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser's online weekly column, American Life in Poetry.

If you identify as a black (or African American) woman and would like to submit work to be considered for this special issue, the deadline is October 1, 2007. Please send up to 5 poems or 15 pages of prose (fiction or memoir) with SASE to:

PMS (Black Women Writers’ Issue)
University of Alabama at Birmingham
Dept. of English, 900 South 13th Street
Birmingham, AL 35294-1260

In addition to sending hard copies of your work to the snail mail address, please ALSO send an electronic copy of your submission (word format) to me at honijeff@aol.com.

Take care, and please spread the word!

All best,
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers


Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is the author of three books of poetry, The Gospel of Barbecue (Kent State 2000), chosen by Lucille Clifton for the 1999 Stan and Tom Wick Prize for Poetry; Outlandish Blues (Wesleyan 2003); and Red Clay Suite (SIU Press 2007) chosen by Dorianne Laux as second prize in the 2006 Crab Orchard Open Competition. Her poetry has been included in several journals and anthologies, including American Poetry Review, African American Review, Blues Poems (Everyman/Random House, 2003), Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz and Literature, Callaloo, Gulf Coast, Ploughshares and Prairie Schooner. An advisory editor for The Kenyon Review, she has received awards from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Bread Loaf Writers Conference. She is a fiction writer as well, and her work has been published in Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (Warner/Aspect 2000), The Kenyon Review, The New England Review, and Story Quarterly, and she was a finalist for the 2005 Zoetrope All-Story Fiction Prize. Honorée is a native southerner, but now lives on the prairie where she is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma.