Washington Writers' Publishing House
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WWPH WRITES 121... spotlights our new pocket-sized, collectible, must-read anthology, CAPITAL LOVE, with a special poetry sampling, "Love To" from Meg Eden, which culminates this collection that speaks, often with wit and satire, about the power of love in these divisive times. Capital Love, our 2026 entry in our new 'Capital' series of anthologies (Capital Queer was our first, in 2025), is now available everywhere books are sold.
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And new for WWPH WRITES, we are thrilled to share "Unprecedented," by Rhonda Zimlich, a short literary nonfiction piece on finding the roots of family at the most difficult of times.
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Our 2026 PRIDE Poetry and Prose Contest, with cash prizes and publication in WWPH WRITES this June, is now open. Judges are the award-winning WWPH writers Mae Moll and Suzanne Feldman. FREE to submit!
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DC, Maryland, and Virginia writers submit your manuscripts of poetry, fiction (novel or short story collection), or literary nonfiction (essay, memoir, or hybrid). Deadline is June 30th. $1,500 in prizes. All publication costs. Editorial and promotional support. Most of all, an opportunity to be a pressmate at your Washington Writers' Publishing House. In this issue, we offer our judges' insights on submissions.
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Capital Love, our 2026 anthology, featuring 55 writers on the power of love and connection, is now available. We will be undertaking a series of readings and events to celebrate, including a big one the-- Capital Love Lit Fest -- on June 28th from 10-6 pm at the Writer's Center of Bethesda. Details below.
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Plus, educators... we are now offering special discounts along with in-depth lesson plans, access to poetry, reflective essays, and visual language texts, all connected to our landmark anthology, AMERICA'S FUTURE. Bring WWPH writing and authors into your classrooms.
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Caroline Bock & Jona Colson
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Meg Eden is a Maryland author of the 2021 Towson Prize for Literature winning poetry collection Drowning in the Floating World and the forthcoming obsolete hill (Fernwood Press, 2026) and children’s novels including the Schneider Family Book Award Honor-winning Good Different, The Girl in the Walls, and Perfect Enough, all with Scholastic. When she isn’t writing, she teaches creative writing students. Find her online at megedenbooks.com.
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"Love To" by Meg Eden was originally published in CAPITAL LOVE, and along with 55 other works poetry and prose is now available everywhere books are sold. With love to Meg and all our contributors! Find them here.
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Unprecedented
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We arrived in Bethesda in the middle of the summer, blown in on the cool breezes from the Pacific Northwest, escaped a month before giant fires ravaged the Cascade kingdoms of fir and pine and choked the blue sky with smoke. We landed in DC during a heatwave and worldwide pandemic. ‘Unprecedented’ became the word of the year—2020. We joined, too, in that unmatched era, for an unprecedented relocation, moving from one coast to the other, with masks and cats and flimsy courage waning to dust by the end of each day. Along with my husband and our teenagers, all wide-eyed and present, all tired and aware, we arrived.
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Used to the cool Pacific Northwest summers, we melted the moment we deplaned. Following the flowing stream of travelers, we swam through the thick air, pulling along bags and expectations. How did this place greet us, where new jobs and new possibilities waited? A traffic-less commute and courteous drivers, which contrasted with the descriptions we’d heard about the slow-and-go, anger-riddled commute famous in DC. We made our way to a home we’d purchased, sight-unseen, the privilege of our audacity oozing from its colonial-shuttered windows. Once settled, we walked along the Bethesda Trolley Trail at dusk, swooning over fireflies while still pining for our longtime home thousands of miles away in Oregon, smoldering from the changing climate. Yet, we arrived eager for change.
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During that first month, we met colleagues at a distance, learning eyes and voices only, assuming smiles hid beneath N95 masks. Our kids hiked and swam and complained about missing their friends back home. We missed our own friends and other things. I missed the cool breezes and air that smelled like camping. Here, the air smelled of Beltway exhaust, bakeries, and urban activity, this busy new home of ours. Then, home was just a word reminding us of severed connections, a word that prompted us to connect again. Roots of trees along Rock Creek reminded us to dig in, to take hold. And so, we did, the best we knew how. We learned about Stella’s Bakery and Bethesda Bagels, took walks along the C&O Canal, discovered crab cakes like one might discover a new world—already there but claimed ‘discovered’ because of the extraordinary impression these made upon us, flavors of the blue crab, breadcrumbs, and Old Bay Seasoning, in its own way unprecedented.
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By six months in, we witnessed a rise in the cases of COVID, met with shock and disdain, like we weren’t expecting it. We saw a primary election unlike any other. We watched with horror as, ten miles south of our home, insurrection occurred on Capitol Hill. And yet, the cardinals still flocked to our bird feeder, and the neighbors still greeted us warmly each day as we walked the dog.
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Eventually, our kids were permitted to return to school in person, asking how can one return to a place they’ve never been? They came home each day to inform us that desks were arranged at six-foot-limit schematics, filling the auditorium, cafeteria, and quad. Even if they were drawn to other young people, the limits prevented friendships from kindling. Each night, we did our best to keep up morale. We watched all the Marvel movies with Bingo sheets the kids had made. “Black-Widow scissor kick,” always the free spot.
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That these were unprecedented times became cliché. Besides, for kids who had only fourteen years of life experience, how could they imagine a different world? The norm became so out of the ordinary, as my husband fought for scarce vaccine appointments, my children fought to keep their sanity—we all did, really.
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Still, we grew together beyond how the survivors of a catastrophe bond. We lifted each other through trials, held one child as they battled anxiety and depression, and held the other as she fought to stay brave, like this was her job to be brave for the rest of us. How unfair that these kids had to focus so much of their attention in this way, when they should have been at the mall, the movies, the local hangout with a dozen kids their age. But we played cards and board games and shared books, the three of them becoming obsessed with Justin Cronin’s The Passage series, occupying dull moments with their conviction to convince me, too, to join the viral-vampire bandwagon. Long days came and went. Second vaccines, too, then bivalent vaccines, their names and dates written onto cards we carried in our wallets to prove our worth when visiting public places. Sometimes arm-in-arm, we strode like a family of protesters standing up to an unprecedented foe.
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All of it was unprecedented. Yet, we outgrew our shock and fear, embracing the next day and the next, becoming the best of humans beginning. Perhaps the most unprecedented thing that we experienced together was the depth of our love for one another, the roots of the family not necessarily growing into the place where we landed, but into each other, an abiding affection that transcended family, something unparalleled and extraordinary. This bond gave our children the courage to spread their wings and follow their dreams, and gave my husband and me the courage to let them go. If unprecedented means something never known before, then we had all arrived at a first—to love each other so dependently, so fiercely, so completely, and then to find our individual ways out from this safe center with the courage to venture, knowing all that could happen.
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Rhonda Zimlich is the Director of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at American University in Washington, DC. Her novel, Raising Panic, won the 2023 Book Award from Steel Toe Books. Other works have received 2024 Nonfiction Award from Barely South Review, the 2021 Mental Health Award for Fiction from Please See Me, the 2020 Literary Award in Nonfiction from Dogwood Journal, among others.
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WWPH SUBMISSIONS for full-length manuscripts in poetry, fiction, and literary fiction now open...
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All WWPH Manuscript Contests are judged by past winners of the contest...meet them and read their insights here...(we will share more in the next issue!)...
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PRIDE 2026 POETRY & PROSE Contest Theme: Transmission: Do You Read Me? In the face of turbulent times, Washington Writers’ Publishing House invites trans, nonbinary, intersex, and other gender expansive writers to send us writing that represents them and their stories. This year for Pride, we wish to focus on highlighting and uplifting trans voices in our community. We believe …
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Sunday, JUNE 21, find us at CAPITAL PRIDE - we will have a table at the DC Capital Pride extravaganza.
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Sunday, June 28th, the CAPITAL LOVE LITFEST! At the Writer's Center in Bethesda. RSVP for this day-long marathon...
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CAPITAL LOVE: A WWPH LOVE Celebration
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55 writers. 56 works of poetry and prose on the power of love ...as an antidote to the divisions of hate. From the Washington Writers' Publishing House, based in our nation's capital since 1975. As of May 5th, officially available books everywhere books are sold! Support your WWPH and buy WWPH DIRECT here.
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We believe AMERICA'S FUTURE has a place in your classroom, and we hope you do too With 179 works of poetry, fiction, essays, and visual language spanning 526 pages, it offers a rich mosaic of writers looking at what's next for our nation through a literary lens. We have developed sample lesson plans suitable for AP-level high school classes and college-level work. We offer a special …
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WWPH WRITERS IN THE NEWS....
Novels Invented Human Rights
by Varun Gauri, author of For the Blessings of Jupiter and Venus, WWPH award-winning novel
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I love novels. I spent many years studying how best to advance economic and social rights around the world.
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My two worlds came together on April 9, 2026, when I gave a keynote at the University of Dayton conference on the social practice of human rights.
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The basic idea is that to read a novel is to exercise imagined empathy for characters you will never meet and their all-too-human struggles, whatever their cultural backgrounds, worldviews, and back stories. The idea of human rights asks exactly the same of us.
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Modern novels went viral in Europe in the late 18th century, at around the same time that human rights doctrines emerged. Novels about the lives of ordinary individuals --servants and workers -- whom the upper classes had previously barely considered to be persons, captivated the authors of key human rights documents, including Thomas Jefferson and Denis Diderot.
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After reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Julie, one reader recounted that he had not cried over Julie’s death but rather was “shrieking, howling like an animal.” Another said she read it not with pleasure but rather with “passion, delirium, spasms, and sobs.”
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I wish I had readers like that...
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For the Blessings of Jupiter and Venus
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Disillusioned with modern romance, globe-trotting Meena tries an arranged marriage with Avi, an aspiring politician in Ohio. But when Avi's political opponent launches racist attacks, Meena and Avi are forced to defend their immigrant community, which narrowly understands its own traditions, and protect their increasingly shaky relationship. This is an intimate, funny, and heartbreaking novel about small-town America and the …
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Happy Mother's Day to all who celebrate!
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Prose editor, WWPH Writes
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See you at the Gaithersburg Book Festival next Saturday! Stop by our table and say hello!
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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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