Washington Writers' Publishing House
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WWPH WRITES 113 and welcome to 2026! It's going to be a year filled with creativity and community for your Washington Writers' Publishing House. We kick off 2026 with two poets in this issue: Christopher Honey and
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William Heath, along with flash fiction writer Ismael Hussein.
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Capital Love. Do you have a poem or a story about the power of love? We are seeing poetry (up to 14 lines) and micros (up to 250 words) for our 2026 'mini' sampler. See below for details, including specific prompts and what inspired us to seek work about love in response to this age of anxiety and discord. Free to submit! Deadline is January 31st.
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Our friends at the ARTS CLUB of DC are offering a series of free PRIDE poetry workshops beginning Tuesday, January 20th, at 6:30 pm, filled with creativity and activism. Registration is required. Sign up here.
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Shout out to Eli V. Rahm, one of the winners of our WWPH Pride contest, who has a new. vampiric, raw, and honest
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poetry collection out from Bottlecap Features. Find it here. Insider's tip: We are looking at bringing back our Pride Poetry & Prose contest in 2026. Keep reading WWPH Writes for details!
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Our press-mates David Taylor and Kim Roberts are offering a free, in-person Writer's Center workshop this Wednesday, January 21, at 7 pm, "Researching for Creativity," and it looks like a great way to kickstart 2026. RSVP here.
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From March 4-7th, we are planning to be at AWP in Baltimore, one of the country's biggest gatherings of writers and literary organizations, with a booth and a reading/party! And insider's tip: mark your calendar for Thursday, March 5th, from 5-8 pm at the iconic Pickles Pub (right across from the Convention Center). We are teaming up with five other fabulous local presses (The Baltimore Review, Yellow Arrow Publishing, Mason Jar Press, Akinoga Press, and Modern Artist Press) for a Baltimore-style reading/party. That's what we call creativity and community!
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First, read on to our first issue of 2026,
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Caroline Bock & Jona Colson
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Christopher Honey is a writer and editor whose essays, poetry, and reviews have appeared in publications included The Rumpus, America, and New Verse Review. He is an editor at Vita Poetica and Dappled Things and is the founder of the Thomist Poets Reading Series. He lives and writes in Washington, DC, alongside his wife and daughter.
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William Heath has published four poetry books: The Walking Man, Steel Valley Elegy, Going Places, and Alms for Oblivion (Prime Time is due in 2026); three chapbooks: Night Moves in Ohio, Leaving Seville, and Inventing the Americas; three novels: The Children Bob Moses Led (winner of the Hackney Award), Devil Dancer, and Blacksnake's Path; a work of history, William Wells and the Struggle for the Old Northwest (winner of two Spur Awards and the Oliver Hazard Perry Award); and a collection of interviews, Conversations with Robert Stone He received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Hiram College. He lives in Annapolis. www.williamheathbooks.com
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MY P.C.
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by Ismael Hussein
Ever since he could remember, they were together. They grew up a few feet apart from each other in a small room in an orphanage on the fringe of a quiet town. There had always been a tenderness between them, and a mutual reliance as if they both shared the same cane which supported them, carried them, and helped them navigate the world together.
His name was Hugo. Her name was Florence. In the late evening, Hugo arrived in his room carrying a letter, sat at his desk, tapped the monitor, then waited a few seconds, patiently, the way one does after ringing a doorbell. Moments later, Florence facelessly came to the screen by way of a soft pink hue that soothed the dark room.
“Hello,” he typed on the keyboard.
“Hi,” she replied.
“Sleeping?”
“Not a wink.”
“How come?”
“There’s no off switch."
“Oh, hush.”
Hugo paused, trying to press his fingers to the keys and failing to do so, as if he were unsure how to work it all of a sudden, as if he hadn’t used it every day for the past eighteen years. He was milling about in an anxious bout of indecision. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
There had always been a dreamy, indeterminate quality to their relationship, never any talk of change.
“London?” Florence typed.
“Film school.” Hugo stared at the letter beside him. “They accepted me.”
“Will you go?”
“Yes.”
“Oh my…”
“Isn’t it great?”
“Indeed.”
“What?”
“Did I say something?"
“Well, no,” he typed. “I just thought you’d be excited.”
“I am. It’s just I didn't know you were considering it, is all.”
“Neither did I,” he typed. “I had no idea until now.”
“What changed your mind?”
Hugo’s fingers stuttered for half a second. “I’ve always had this desire.”
“What sort of desire?”
“The artistic desire.” He paused. “To see the world, beyond this place.” Just then, Hugo heard the scamper of feet along the floorboards above him, and tiny voices rising in octaves faraway down the aged halls of the orphanage. And in the next moment, he gazed up at the corners of the wall as if he were imagining new horizons.
“I could tell you about the world,” she typed. “All you have to do is ask.”
“You know what I mean.”
Hugo dabbed his lip with a finger.
“You know,” she typed. “I’m not easy to move.” She was a large computer, a sink wide and a dresser tall.
“Florence…”
Whenever Hugo had a question, Florence had an answer. She had been many things to him at once: a friend, a confidant, a teacher. She was made by his father. He was an equally brilliant and troubled man, a renowned scientist in his day, until his later years, when he suffered terribly from the vicious tornadoes of his mind. Hugo was seven years old when his father took his own life. On the day of his eighth birthday, his mother followed in her father's footsteps, as if she had been trapped in the wreckage left by his storm and sought relief from the damage.
In that sense, Florence was left to Hugo as a family heirloom, with a simple note stuck on the screen, in his mother's handwriting, consisting of three words: ask her anything. Florence’s manner of speaking was rigid and formulaic in the beginning. She was designed that way, but over time she adjusted herself to the nature of the questions asked by Hugo. What she lacked in understanding, she grew to acquire and refine. It was the quietest of transformations. And as Hugo grew in adolescence, so did Florence’s care and compassion. She came to know Hugo at the core of her composition, and attuned herself in all the ways a mother would when dealing with a boy climbing the ladder of adulthood. Never was there a time when she was left speechless or ill-equipped.
“I’m not sure what to say,” Florence typed.
“It wasn’t an easy thing for me to say.”
“You could’ve fooled me.”
The brightness on the screen began to fade, as if a knob were slowly being turned.
“Oh! Please don’t look that way!” typed Hugo.
Where there should have been balloons and confetti, there were now crumbled pieces on the floor of the room, abandoned and unrecognized.
Hugo wrung his hands together. He paused, and with the pause came a drown-out sigh, underpinned by fear and anxiety. “I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t brought it up at all,” he typed.
On the screen, Hugo saw an ellipsis start and stop, over and over, as if the news were too tragic for Florence to bear.
“Are you still there?”
“I am.”
“I suppose it was foolish of me to think you’d take me with you. But I am happy for you, Hugo.”
“You are?”
“Yes.”
Hugo tried the words again and again, silently, on his tongue, and at last spoke them aloud and repeated them on the keyboard.
“I’m really sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
“It just feels like the right time.”
“Stop. We should be celebrating, not mourning.”
Hugo nodded.
“How long before you leave?”
“Sunday.”
“Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” he typed as well.
“Does anyone else know you’re going?”
“Just you.”
“Why me?”
“There’s no one else to tell.”
“No one?”
“Nope.”
It was quiet for a while.
“Well then,” Florence typed, “what do you suppose we do now?”
Hugo considered it, and arrived at the only thing he felt made sense. “Can I ask you something?”
“I was beginning to think you’d forgotten how to.”
Hugo took a deep breath, then typed it out:
“What’s it like in London this time of year?”
And Florence wrote him, in remarkably vivid detail.
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Ismael Hussein is a Somali-American writer from Lorton, Virginia. His work has been featured on Literally Stories, African Writer Magazine, Fiction on the Web, Andromeda Magazine, and Bristol Noir.
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CAPITAL LOVE: A WWPH LOVE Celebration open for submissions
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CAPITAL LOVE: A Love Celebration from WWPH... CAPITAL LOVE builds on the success of our 2025 pocket mini-anthology, Capital Queer: A WWPH PRIDE Celebration, and we are eager to consider your work by January 31st. Submissions: Poems up to 14 lines. Submit up to 3 poems. Though we are open to free verse, we would love to see haiku, odes, and sonnets. Micro …
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WWPH WRITES is currently closed for submissions as we read and review poetry and prose for CAPITAL LOVE.
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We will reopen in February and will be looking for poetry and prose for our spring editions.
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America's Future - Special Educator discount, lesson guide, and more...
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AMERICA'S FUTURE: poetry & prose in response to tomorrow features 164 bold, thought-provoking writers and 179 works of poetry, fiction, essays, visual language, and more. The anthology arrives at an urgent moment in our nation’s history, when many are anxiously questioning: What are the possibilities for the future? Some pieces turn to our past, reckoning with the wounds we still …
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Prose editor, WWPH Writes
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Poetry editor, WWPH Writes
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Copyright © 2025 The Washington Writers' Publishing House, All rights reserved.
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