Festival Director Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez will be teaming up with author and publisher Jana Laiz to edit Writing Fire, an anthology celebrating the power of women’s words and the first five years of the Berkshire Festival of Women Writers.
Festival presenters are especially encouraged to submit their work for the anthology, but any woman, of any age, who was inspired to write by the Berkshire Festival of Women Writers is welcome to submit their work for consideration.
Poetry or prose in any genre is invited; fiction or non-fiction, up to 2500 words (10 pages, typed double-spaced). The editors are especially interested in writing that addresses the Festival themes of building community, relationships between mothering and creativity, women’s rites of passage, masculinity and femininity, women and healing, “women’s work,” “writing to right the world,” and “linking the personal and the planetary.”
There is a reading fee of $35 per submission (poetry or prose within word limit). Submissions without checks included will not be considered. Our intention with this fee is to “crowd-source” the funding to produce the book (and to that end, higher donations gratefully accepted with your submission). If the reading fee presents a barrier to you, please email and let us know why. Some scholarships available.
Submissions must include a cover sheet with title, author’s name, mailing address, email and phone number, and a short bio (100 words max), plus the reading fee (make checks payable to Bard College at Simon’s Rock/BFWW). No emailed submissions accepted: mail your submission in hard copy to Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez, Bard College at Simon’s Rock, 84 Alford Road, Great Barrington MA 01230.
Postmark Deadline: June 18, 2014
Authors whose work is accepted for publication will be notified by September 15, 2014 and the book will launch during the 2015 Fifth Annual Berkshire Festival of Women Writers. All profits from the sale of this collection will benefit the Berkshire Festival of Women Writers and Festival Books.
Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez
Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Media Studies at Bard College at Simon’s Rock and has edited two anthologies of contemporary women’s writing from Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. The Founding Director of the Berkshire Festival of Women Writers, she blogs on social and environmental justice from a personal perspective at Transition Times. Her memoir, Why I Forgot…and Why I Remembered: A Purposeful Memoir of Personal and Planetary Transformation, will be published in 2015.
Jaina Laiz
Jana Laiz is the award-winning author of Weeping Under This Same Moon, The Twelfth Stone, A Free Woman On God’s Earth, Elephants of the Tsunami, and Thomas & Autumn. She is the first Writer-In-Residence at Herman Melville’s Berkshire home, Arrowhead. She teaches writing workshops locally, nationally and internationally, including the 2014 San Miguel Writer’s Conference. Find her at janalaiz.com.
