D.L. Lang's Blog

Where to find calls for submissions for poetry anthologies

Since 2020 I was very focused on becoming more widely published as a poet. My original goal was to be published in 6 anthologies so that I could have an official listing on the Poets & Writers‘ directory. By 2025 that number blossomed to 95 anthologies.

I got pretty good at locating opportunities, and began to share them with members of the Vallejo Poetry Society. Because it became too labor intensive, I have taken a step back from local event promotion and searching for these calls, so I am sharing all of my tips and tricks to find anthologies below. My submissions queue is empty due to writer’s block, and I’m taking a break for an indefinite period of time until the muse decides to grace me with inspiration again.

Duotrope’s submissions calendar is a useful in finding anthology calls by reputable publishers, but it requires a subscription. Submittable’s Discover tool will bring up current listings when you type in anthology as a keyword. Both of these services are useful for keeping track of which poem was submitted to what publication.

Some publishers like Moonstone Arts Center and Alien Buddha Press have multiple calls for submission on a regular basis, and have a proven publication history. I’d also recommend checking for submission calls from Vagabond Books, Inner Child Press, B Cubed Press, Colossus Press, CivicLeicester, and Pure Slush. You can see a list of my publications and use your favorite search engine to find their official websites and check for open calls. The non-anthology publications that have featured me the most are Emerge Magazine, the Benicia Herald’s Going the Distance column, and Fevers of the Mind.

Some San Francisco Bay Area groups put out an annual anthology, including the Benicia First Tuesday Poets, the Marin Poetry Center, the Ina Coolbrith Circle , the Redwood Writers Club, the Napa Valley Writers, and the Revolutionary Poets Brigade. Some of these groups require membership and dues prior to submission. Festivals like the Rio Grande Valley Poetry Festival, National Beat Poetry Festival, and Waco Word Fest also publish anthologies.

I found anthology calls on social media by using various search terms like “send poems anthology” or “email poems anthology” or “submissions poetry anthology.” Using Facebook’s search tool limit the search to recent posts within the current year to narrow it down to currently open calls for submission. There are also numerous Call for Submissions groups on Facebook and other social media websites.

Authors Publish, Write.Info, Rick Lupert’s Poetry Super Highway, Deborah Fruchey’s Strictly East, Trish Hopkinson, Erica Verrillo, Cathy Bryant, and Erika Dreifus are great resources for poets looking for opportunities. 

There are so many opportunities out there that if you hold out for the right one, you won’t be paying someone to reject your work. Publishers vary in practice from those who charge a reader fee or ask that you buy a copy of the paperback to those who will pay you for your submission and/or give you a pdf or paperback copy of the final product. It’s up to your budget what opportunities you decide to pursue.

I recommend researching the publisher to make sure the publisher is a legitimate organization with a real web presence run by an experienced editor. If they are looking to charge you a ridiculous fee to be published or charge the reader a hundreds of dollars to read the final book, it is most likely a vanity press or a scam. Winning Writers and the Library of Congress both have a great list of vanity publishers to avoid. Check websites like Writer Beware for the latest news on author scams. They had a great article in 2021 on City Limits Publishing. I was one of the poets who won one of their contests in 2020 and was never paid.

In the 1990s I also fell for the International Library of Poetry scam when I was a child, but my parents were wise enough to never pay them any money. In my 30s I tried to seek out a copy of the handful of out of print anthologies that I was supposedly published in, contacting libraries to confirm and buying used copies from eBay, but my poems were not included nor listed in the index. For a short period of time at the turn of the century their website did have one of my childhood poems published on it, but I never found any evidence it was ever included in a print anthology. I forget which poem.

I feel accomplished enough to let go of my practice of regularly seeking out publication opportunities. I hope the links provided in this post help you find some success.

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You Cannot Trust the Robots to Tell the Truth

After receiving so much AI-generated email spam filled with inaccuracies about myself and my career, I got curious about what the robots were saying about me. Despite much of my actual biographical information being easily verifiable in decades of newspaper articles and press interviews, rather than do some basic research, both artificial intelligence and many advertisement riddled websites choose to invent fantasies about my personal life and career and present them as fun facts.

If you need an accurate biography to introduce me at a reading or to write an article about me, please go to my official biography to verify facts or reach out to me directly if you need something more up to date. Some of what is posted online about me is hilariously inaccurate, so please don’t believe everything you read online.

This birthday website claims that I grew up in “a small town in Germany,” and that I studied English Literature at a “prestigious University in Germany.” It presents a handful of well known 20th century poets as my influences. None of this is true.

Indeed I was born in Germany and spent a handful of summers there in childhood, but I was educated at American institutions in Louisiana and Oklahoma, and my major at university was Film & Video Studies. I graduated from Enid High School, Northern Oklahoma College, and the University of Oklahoma.

My poetry did not magically catch the attention of literary agents and publishers straight out of college, nor was writing the focus of my career ambitions in my 20s. My publications go through the slush pile, competing with countless other submissions just like every other published poet.

I self-published the first edition of Tea & Sprockets in 2004 through CafePress while I was still in college. At the time I had no ambitions for my debut poetry book other than to preserve an archive of my teenaged writings solely for sentimental reasons. I was in my 30s when I started sharing my poetry on a wider scale both in print and on stage.

This Myers-Briggs personality website claims I wrote a poem called “A World Without War” that won a grand prize at the 2001 Spring Fling Poetry Contest in Santa Barbara. While I’ve certainly written numerous poems against war since the mid-1990s, I do not have a poem with that exact title.

I tried to find out any information about the Santa Barbara News-Press Spring Fling Poetry Contest to see if it actually exists, but I only found that Google’s AI then uses this wholly fictitious biography as a source and presents it as confirmed fact.

The same website also falsely claims that I wrote a poem called “Tea Leaves” that won an honorable mention at the 2014 San Francisco Book Festival. I have no association with this festival at all, nor do I have a poem with that title. My guess is that this word salad is referencing Tea & Sprockets, and perhaps, my having filmed the Enid music festival A Fling at the Springs for PEGASYS. While I did win filmmaking and academic awards in the early 2000s, I did not start winning any awards for my writing until 2015.

Artificial intelligence is even worse about getting the facts wrong about poems that I actually did write. It often invents inaccurate summaries of my poems. For example, let’s look at my poetry describing my former hometown of Enid, Oklahoma.

“East Maine Noms” is a humorous take on the East Maine railroad bridge which is notorious for the number of semi-trucks that collide with it. Instead of providing a real summary, the Bing AI hallucinates that I am writing about “local eateries.”

“Blanton-Kiowa Line” is about a real railroad line that once existed until the mid-1990s, and is not as the AI suggests “a metaphor for personal growth.” I became fascinated with Blanton, Oklahoma due to there being a large sign for the railroad stop near Oakwood Nature Park where I would play with my friends as a teenager. I did years of research about W.B. Blanton, and the Enid News & Eagle even published my article about it. This rail line no longer exists and the City of Enid has plans to convert it into a walking trail.

“Dining with Your Skeleton” was my first attempt at romanticizing Enid and it contains references to numerous historical figures connected to Enid. I wrote it while staying in a motel room in Marin County almost a decade after relocating from Oklahoma, and not in one of “Enid’s quiet corners.”

Searching my real name, married or maiden, brings up wholly inaccurate information about me in the summary at the top of the page. It links me to people who are not my relatives, places me in career fields I have no experience in, and often confuses me with other persons of the same name.

The Enid newspaper referred to Grey as “Enid’s own musician Grey” in a headline about one of my many film projects featuring Grey, yet somehow AI confuses me for him. While I did play second violin for five years in school orchestra in the 1990s, have dabbled in electronic music, and I do love music, I could hardly be classified as a musician let alone known for it. It scrapes an and describes Liquid Wind as a company instead of an extreme sports documentary. Google’s AI has also erroneously decided that I worked a visual effects artist on The Lord of the Rings.

Of the major search engines, Bing’s automated summary of my career seems to be the most accurate and well sourced, but Google gets easily verifiable facts completely wrong. It even second guesses information printed in the legitimate newspapers where I have tried to clear up frequent confusion about myself and Diana Lang, the local realtor, stating that we “appear to be the same person.” We are two distinct people both notable in Vallejo for vastly different accomplishments within the community.

My net worth is absolutely nobody’s business, yet sites like this exist to give people financial facts that are outright lies. I am not and have never been a millionaire, let alone a multi-billionaire as this website would have you believe.

The point is artificial intelligence or random websites claiming to have inside information about personality types, birthdays, astrology, or net worth are often presenting inaccurate information about public figures. Always go to the source or verified third party news outlets for your research. If they can misrepresent me in their automatic summaries even with so much accurate source material available, they are likely doing the same thing with information about everyone else.

And besides, our water supply is much more important, than receiving a microwave instant summary about whatever subject you are looking up on a search engine.

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The Robots think I’m bigger than the Beatles

Lately, I’ve noticed an uptick in “fan mail.” Despite my FAQ clearly stating “Do not email me to try to sell me something. I will mark you as spam and not respond,” I receive about 4 of these emails a day.

These emails are riddled with biographical and bibliographical errors based on out of date information scraped from the internet. I can tell when someone hasn’t actually read my work and just relied on my summary before they reach out to contact me. They commonly reference my first book, Tea & Sprockets, or one of the 95 anthologies where I am listed as a contributor and would not be the appropriate person to contact about those titles anyways.

These emails are not sincere messages about enjoying my poetry. They appear to have been written by artificial intelligence. They are filled with word salad replete with emojis and back handed compliments, trying to get me to buy some kind of book promotion service, provide free copies of my books to a book club in exchange for “exposure,” or sell me on some kind of gimmick for online book reviews. They often leap to conclusions about my content based on my titles.

For example, I recently received an email from a “Cristina William” with the subject line “300+ performances, 13 poetry books, but only this many reviews?” Firstly, I have performed nearly 500 times since 2015, and I have 18 poetry collections. My time has been largely consumed with writing new material and performing it in the real world as opposed to being overly concerned with what people are saying online about me.

I do find the quip about 300+ live readings being more than most rock bands quite laughable. I highly doubt that I go harder than my favorite musicians who tour for months on end night after night!

A few days later I received a similar email by a “Novera Elwyn,” who for someone with supposedly 2000+ readers at their beck and call, has an absolutely dismal lack of a search engine presence. This email also claims that I have “more performances under my belt than most rock bands.” This is statistically untrue. The Beatles gave 1,400 stage performances in four years. I hope to hit 500 in 2026 which would be my 11th year of performances, and my count includes radio broadcasts. This is likely the same scammer under a different name because the odds of two people emailing me with similar commentary is wild.

Why don’t I have more reviews? The answer is simple. The thousands of folks who have copies of my books and ebooks haven’t taken the time to write a review.

The above email also hilariously compares my latest book to a child picked last in gym class as a way of attempting to insult me. I have 59 reviews on Goodreads across numerous books. There are 52 reviews and rankings on my Amazon books, not including anthologies I am in or edited. This adds up to 111 reviews which is no small number.

My ebooks are available through many other platforms, but since these inquiries seem super concerned about my Amazon review ratio versus my sales, for full transparency here are my Amazon sales from the past 16 years: 4672. This number includes KDP Select freebies before I chose wider ebook distribution in 2020. I’ve only had 121 downloads on other ebook platforms.

4672 books and ebooks including free KDP Select downloads prior to having wider distribution

In my decade of performance experience, I have been more likely to sell a paperback book or swap with other authors at my in person appearances or through local bookstores instead of online, so a person is unlikely to visit Goodreads or a competing online retailer just to throw a rating my way when they got it directly from me or a local business. Popularity doesn’t always translate to sales, and sales don’t always translate to reviews.

I assume my books are sitting in thousands of TBR piles around the world. I don’t take it personally. I don’t have the bandwidth to play along with common marketing schemes to fool potential readers into parting with their hard earned cash in the middle of an economic recession.

If a person wants to review my work, good or bad, there is nothing stopping them from doing so. Just buy a book and leave a review if you feel so moved. Most of my reviews are organic and received over a long span of time. I don’t swap reviews with other authors in order to artificially inflate my numbers nor bribe readers to review my work. My earlier titles have more reviews because I was giving away ebooks, but even those review numbers are no where close to the number of actual downloads.

In the past I purchased professional editorial reviews from Kirkus and Realistic Poetry whose feedback I appreciated, but I no longer have the budget for this. The amount of sales due to these reviews did not justify the initial investment. Given that I have carpal tunnel syndrome, I am not spending countless hours on author networking groups trying to do review swaps or artificially inflate my social media follower numbers with folks who likely won’t interact with me anyways.

Reviews and online followers are not the only metric of an author’s popularity or perhaps, lack thereof. I have had the honor of performing my poetry for organizations that I respect with countless poets that I admire. I’m not lying awake at night worried about a lack of book reviews. Over the past ten years I’ve received innumerable compliments, hugs, awards, news coverage, repeat invites, government proclamations, and opportunities. All of that speaks much louder than a star rating on a website.

You aren’t entitled to free copies of my paperback books when there’s plenty of videos and recordings of my performances, and online publications that you can access for free if you need a writing sample to determine whether or not it is worth your hard earned money to own copies of my larger collections.

If a fellow author or reader wants to review me, they’re more than welcome to do so of their own volition, and if a fellow poet wants a back of the book blurb, they know how to contact me for an inquiry.

Other posts that address these scams:

When AI Becomes a Weapon: The Rise of Sophisticated Book Marketing Scams by Tod NewmanWriter Beware: Return of the Nigerian Prince: A New Twist on Book Marketing Scams by Victoria StraussIf you receive a flattering email about your book, it may be written by an AI by Jonathan EmmettMy Life as an AI Hallucination by Anne R. Allen

The post The Robots think I’m bigger than the Beatles appeared first on D.L. Lang.

No, I don’t want to buy your book review service

Lately, I’ve noticed an uptick in “fan mail.” Despite my FAQ clearly stating “Do not email me to try to sell me something. I will mark you as spam and not respond,” I receive about 4 of these emails a day.

These emails are riddled with biographical and bibliographical errors based on out of date information scraped from the internet. I can tell when someone hasn’t actually read my work and just relied on my summary before they reach out to contact me. They commonly reference my first book, Tea & Sprockets, instead of my most recent releases, or one of the 95 anthologies where I am listed as a contributor and would not be the appropriate person to contact about those titles anyways.

These emails are not sincere messages about enjoying my poetry. They appear to have been written by artificial intelligence. They are filled with word salad replete with emojis and back handed compliments, trying to get me to buy some kind of book promotion service, provide free copies of my books to a book club in exchange for “exposure,” or sell me on some kind of gimmick for online book reviews.

For example, I recently received an email with the subject line “300+ performances, 13 poetry books, but only this many reviews?” Firstly, I have performed nearly 500 times since 2015, and I have 18 poetry collections, so my time is consumed with writing new material and performing it in the real world as opposed to being overly concerned with what people are saying online about me. I do find the quip about 300+ live readings being more than most rock bands quite laughable. I highly doubt that I go harder than my favorite musicians who tour for months on end night after night!

The answer is simple. I barely have any online reviews because the thousands of folks who have copies of my books and ebooks haven’t taken the time to write a review. My ebooks are available through many other platforms, but since the inquiry was super concerned with my Amazon review ratio versus my sales, for full transparency here are my Amazon sales, including freebies before I had wider distribution, from the past 16 years.

4672 books and ebooks including free KDP Select downloads prior to having wider distribution

In my decade of experience, I have been more likely to sell a book or swap with other authors at my in person appearances or through local bookstores instead of online, so a person is unlikely to visit Goodreads or another competing retailer just to throw a rating my way when they got it directly from me or a local business. Popularity doesn’t always translate to sales, and sales don’t always translate to reviews.

I assume my books are sitting in hundreds of TBR piles around the world. I don’t take it personally. I don’t have the bandwidth to play along with common marketing schemes to fool potential readers into parting with their hard earned cash in the middle of an economic recession.

If a person wants to review my work, good or bad, there is nothing stopping them from doing so. Just buy a book and leave a review if you feel so moved. Most of my reviews are organic and received over a long span of time. I don’t swap reviews with other authors in order to artificially inflate my numbers nor bribe readers to review my work.

In the past I purchased professional editorial reviews from Kirkus and Poetry International whose feedback I appreciated, but I no longer have the budget for this. The amount of sales due to these reviews did not justify the initial investment. Given that I have carpal tunnel syndrome, I am not spending countless hours on author networking groups trying to do review swaps or artificially inflate my social media follower numbers with folks who likely won’t interact with me anyways.

Reviews and online followers are not the only metric of an author’s popularity or perhaps, lack thereof. I have had the honor of performing my poetry for organizations that I respect with countless poets that I admire. I’m not lying awake at night worried about a lack of book reviews. Over the past ten years I’ve received innumerable compliments, hugs, awards, news coverage, repeat invites, and opportunities that speak much louder than a star rating on a website.

You aren’t entitled to free copies of my paperback books when there’s plenty of videos and recordings of my performances that you can access for free, and online publications that you can access for free if you need a writing sample to determine whether or not it is worth your hard earned money to own copies of my larger collections.

If a fellow author or reader wants to review me, they’re more than welcome to do so of their own volition, and if a fellow poet wants a back of the book blurb, they know how to contact me for an inquiry.

Other posts that address these scams:

When AI Becomes a Weapon: The Rise of Sophisticated Book Marketing Scams by Tod NewmanWriter BewareIf you receive a flattering email about your book, it may be written by an AI by Jonathan EmmettMy Life as an AI Hallucination by Anne R. Allen

The post No, I don’t want to buy your book review service appeared first on D.L. Lang.

Songs

In 2016, Greg “Grey” Perkins took four of my poems from Tea & Sprockets and created the song, “Oh My Chameleon Perceptions” with Mike Harbour and Steven Harwood. The song appears on his album Booze & Psychedelics. Support Greg by downloading songs from iTunes here.

On the 2025 album Headline Antidote, Grey created “Headline Antidote,” “Musty Books,” and “Life of Dreams” from some of my older poetry. You can purchase the album from Greg on his website.

In 2016, Fred Ross-Perry took some words of poetry that I’d submitted to La Familia and expanded them into song lyrics, “Peace Will Come.” Support Fred by buying his songs on BandCamp here.

In 2004, I wrote the words to “Last Chance Disaster.” Jon Carrube later slightly modified the poem, creating song lyrics and adding a melody. Jon Carrube & I sing together.

Below is the acoustic version of “Last Chance Disaster” recorded in 2011. Greg plays guitar.

I released this version under the name Tranquoizier. Mikey Harbour plays drums and keyboards on the full version.

I remixed the sound and added it to Muffins in Space.

The post Songs appeared first on D.L. Lang.

A look back at 2024: Performances and Publications

Opening 2025, I have been interviewed and published at California Poets. I performed at Benicia’s MLK Day celebration, at Revolution Books for an Anti-Fascist Revolutionary Poetry Night and at Lake Merritt for Not My President’s Day. “American Dream” launched with Athena on February 26th and landed on the moon on March 6th. I have upcoming features for the Ina Coolbrith Poetry Circle via Zoom and at Monkey House in Berkeley.

I edited a Grateful Dead themed anthology which was released by Hercules Publishing on January 15th, and there will be a reading of California based poets on June 28th at Alibi Bookshop. I am also compiling an anthology of Vallejo’s Poets Laureate and hoping to compile one of all the Solano County based poets laureate as well. I have upcoming publications in this year’s editions of Emerge magazine.

I meant to publish this retrospective on January 1st. However, life got in the way, so I am presenting it to you now.

In 2024 my poetry was published in 16 online publications, 3 print lit journals, 22 anthologies, and I also had 3 journalistic articles published. I am currently experiencing numerous months of writer’s block which resulted in my Submittable queue emptying out for the first time in 4 years. I lost track of the rejections this year, but there were some. You can see a list of published poems available online here and a list of anthologies here.

This year I added Colorado and Indiana to the list of states that I’ve had poetry published in, and Scotland and the Netherlands to the list of countries, bringing the total to 16 states and 8 countries. In an incredible twist, one of my poems, “American Dream” is on its way to the moon with the Lunar Codex. It will travel to the moon twice with Athena and Polaris in 2025.

Though the number of performances this year were less frequent, they were meaningful. I’m grateful when I get to use my art to support the struggle for a better world. To my surprise the Vallejo City Council named me among several local women activists in a proclamation for Women’s History Month.

I was also honored to have a poem printed in the CPUSA’s convention booklet, and was an online panelist for the Party’s writer’s group twice. I also performed with the Revolutionary Poets Brigade at the Starry Plough in support of Toomaj Salehi and other political prisoners, following up on the 2023 event honoring Mahsa Jina Amini at Revolution Books in Berkeley. I also performed at Specs for the Dadaist journal Maintenant, and at Laborfest Sing Out! at Eric Quezada Center for Culture and Politics. I also had three poems accepted for display as part of the Causing Cultural Anarchy: Censored & Banned exhibit. I encourage you to check out my book Fighting the Solar System if you’re interested in political poetry.

Making new friends in the Oklahoma poetry community was certainly a highlight of my year, having performed at Scissortail Creative Writing Festival in Ada, Ink and Inspiration in Enid, and the Woody Guthrie Folk Festival. My activism took me back to Oklahoma as well, and I am grateful for the work of the Enid Social Justice Committee. I wrote two articles for People’s World, and a followup for the People’s Tribune.

I was interviewed on KZCT, KPFA, and by Fevers of the Mind this year. I featured at 1428 Poets in the Haight and 3rd Saturday Poetry in Chinatown in San Francisco, the Solano County Fair and Visions of the Wild in Vallejo, and the Jewish People Exhibit at the Vallejo Museum. Congregation B’nai Israel invited me to perform a poem on the occasion of their affiliation with the Reconstructionist Movement. I hosted 12 Rounds featuring Kyrah Ayers at Mare Island Art Studios.

2024 marks ten years of spoken word performances. Although I was asked to share one of my poems at a synagogue gathering in May 2013, I count December 6, 2014 as my debut because I caught the performing bug, and it was life changing. After months of wrestling with my stage fright, the next year beginning April 9, 2015, I started attending Poetry by the Bay which at the time met twice a month.

62% my performing has been in Solano County which is a testament to the close knit, supportive poetry community here. Over the years I performed 104 times at Poetry by the Bay, including once as a guest host. I have appeared 54 times on KZCT, including 5 featured interviews. I attended Poetry in Notion 30 times, including 19 times as host and once to teach self-publishing. I’ve read at over 100 other events in Vallejo, Benicia, and Fairfield.

Certainly, my busiest years were during my service as Vallejo’s Poet Laureate where I was performing nearly every week. Although the number of open mics has grown in Solano County, I have cut back considerably.

If my counting is correct, then 449 performances by the end of 2024.

2013: 12014: 12015: 292016: 452017: 462018: 642019: 632020: 362021: 362022: 512023: 372024: 40

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Poetry is Dead II: Grateful Dead Poetry Anthology

Poetry is Dead II: Once You’re Dead, You’re Dead Forever (Hercules Publishing, ISBN: 979-8-218-54778-3) was released on January 15th, 2025. Retail cost $27.50. Buy it on Amazon.

Follow these pages for updates:

Facebook Profile URL: https://www.facebook.com/DeadheadPoetry

Hercules Publishing: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063855708710

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Call for Submissions: Grateful Dead anthology

Honored to say that I’ve been asked to edit an upcoming Grateful Dead anthology by Hercules Publishing called Poetry is Dead II: Once You’re Dead, You’re Dead Forever!

Deadline is November 1st, 2024.

Send poems to DeadForeverAnthology@gmail.com

Selected contributors receive $20 and 3 copies of the anthology.

This is the sequel to Poetry is Dead: An Inclusive Anthology of Deadhead Poetry which was released in 2022. You can grab that here.

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A bit of a retrospective

I moved to Vallejo ten years ago this month. I began performing my poetry in December 2014. I first read at Poetry by the Bay in April 2015. I became Vallejo’s poet laureate in 2017, and during my tenure I judged 8 contests, hosted over 25 shows, and performed 141 times in 18 different cities. I’ve put together a retrospective page of some of the highlights by year with more specific details. I am slowly working on adding links to videos if they exist. I figured I’d do a retrospective blog post mainly for my own amusement, but perhaps, so others can see my statistics.

While I used to just leap at every opportunity, I have become far more discerning about the kind of performances and publications that I lend my voice to. There are currently at minimum 6 poetry open mics per month in Solano County, and I have resigned myself to not being able to commit to performing that frequently. This year I cut back quite a bit in order to focus on my ongoing health issues, and consequently, I am spending more time bird watching, drinking tea, and relaxing in solitude.

In addition to reducing my general attendance at open mics, I turned down a number of opportunities in order to bring more balance into my life. I prefer to focus on performing occasional poetry, featured sets, writing for ekphrastic events, and submitting to anthologies. I don’t mind judging or entering the occasional contest, but now that I am no longer a poet laureate, I’d rather leave the hosting, event planning, and teaching to other qualified poets.

I’ve won 44 ribbons across 4 different county fairs since 2015. Although I did not enter any county fairs in 2023, I did win a spot in the Curbside haiku contest in Tulsa which was a highlight of the year along with returning to Oklahoma for WoodyFest. It was my first time performing in front of an audience in a state other than California. The trip allowed me to see a number of old friends from my childhood that I hadn’t hung out with in years.

In 2023 despite this recalibration, I am hardly resting on my laurels. I still managed to perform 37 times and was published 21 times. I think my performance statistics are slightly below my personal average in 2023, but I’d have to reverse engineer previous years to know for certain. Prior to the pandemic I was averaging once a week. Both the number of press mentions and publication rejections were a ridiculous personal record in 2023.

2023

25 rejections received16 mentions in the press13 anthologies published in 202312 featured poet or occasional poetry performances11 still pending submissions8 other publications8 open mics7 anthology performances7 radio performances 3 anthology publications coming in 20243 ekphrastic performances1 journal acceptance, publication coming in 20241 haiku contest won1 hall of fame1 city council proclamation mention1 contest judged1 poet laureate selection committee 

In late October 2022 I calculated that 25% of my poetry performances since 2015 were at Poetry by the Bay (38% just open mics in general), 13% at OZCAT (15% radio in general), 8% at Poetry in Notion, 6% for fundraisers and protests, 4% featured sets (10 minutes or more), 6% Jewish events, 4% anthologies, 3% at festivals or fairs, 3% judging, 2% writing to art, 2% with other PLs, and 1% teaching.

At that time it was a total of 380 performances. 274 of those were in Solano County. I’ve been terrible about meticulously keeping track of performances in 2023 due to life events and health issues getting in the way. I did five more performances after October 2022 and 37 in 2023, so my guess is that I’ll start out 2024 with a total of 422 lifetime performances. 

I see the value in traditional publications because my poetry travels to places that I cannot, and thanks to Zoom, I am able to read for new audiences from the comfort of home. Since 2017 I’ve been published in the American states of New York, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, South Carolina, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Washington, California, Tennessee, Texas, Rhode Island, Arizona, and Minnesota. Outside of the United States my poetry is in multiple anthologies from Kenya, United Kingdom, Canada, India, Israel, and Australia. 

Alien Buddha Press and Moonstone Arts Center have the current lead with number of acceptances being 12 and 10 anthologies, respectively. They both publish numerous themed anthologies per year on topics that are on my wavelength. Publication statistics are below and a detailed list is on the bibliography page.

I made 63 submissions in 2020, 15 in 2021, 18 in 2022, and 32 in 2023. Before that I didn’t keep an accurate count, and I focused on self-publishing full collections instead. 13 anthologies published me in 2023, 17 in 2022, 19 in 2021, 10 in 2020, 1 in 2019, 2 in 2018, 1 in 2017. 4 other publications in 2022, 2 others in 2021, 8 in 2020, 1 in 2015, 3 in 2016, 2 in 2017, 5 in 2018, 1 in 2019. I had 25 rejections in 2023, 7 rejections in 2022, 2 in 2021, 23 rejections in 2020. I kept track of 5 rejections in 2019, 1 in 2018, 16 in 2016, and 2 in 2015, but there were certainly more in those years than I have a record of.

I did submit to publications prior to 2015, but 100% rejections isn’t worth keeping track of. Most of those rejections were literary journals at the time. Since I started focusing my efforts on writing for themed anthologies, my hit rate has been at least 50%. I received my first literary journal acceptance in 2023.

I am not currently focusing on writing books per se, since this isn’t a money making venture. Please support Alibi Bookshop, Bookshop Benicia, and Revolution Books in Berkeley if you wish to buy my existing paperbacks. They have several in stock. I look forward to whatever my tenth year of performing shall bring.

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