CAPITAL LOVE: A Love Celebration from WWPH
CAPITAL LOVE follows our 2025 pocket mini-anthology, Capital Queer: A WWPH PRIDE celebration. A second pocket-sized anthology of about 30-50 writers over approximately 100 pages, and we’d love to see your work included. 
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 stories (fiction or nonfiction) up to 250 words. Though we are open to all forms, we would love to see some experiments with language or form.
Please add to submissions: Explain in 1-3 sentences how your work fits the prompt. What inspired your work? We might use this to promote the collection.
Submission period: January 3-January 31. Free to submit via our Submittable account here.
Open: To all writers from DC, Maryland, and Virginia, and to all those who have a connection to the DMV (lived here, worked here, educated here). Plus, we are particularly interested in seeing writers who have never been published by WWPH in this new collection.
Payment: $25.00 per contributor and 1 contributor copy
Target Publication date: May 5, 2026
Inspiration/Prompts:
The Washington Writers’ Publishing House has been uniquely positioned at the intersection of the literary and the political, with its base in Washington, D.C., for the past 50 years. Now, as we approach our nation’s 250th anniversary, amidst the political turmoil and anxiety in our region and country, we want to explore the most central human connection and strength: the power of love.
How do we express the power of love: for ourselves, others, and/or communities amid the political turmoil and anxiety?
How can we fight against isolation and loneliness with the power of love?
How do you define love in the face of/or in defiance of the cruelty and despair seen too often from our political leaders?
We are NOT looking for sentimentality or melodrama or emotional bosh. Please leave all Hallmark cliches to the Hallmark romcoms (which we will admit we watched on occasion during the holiday season).
We are looking for the works in CAPITAL LOVE, to bring us together, to heal, and to make us think more about what we want, expect, and need from ourselves and others, particularly at this moment rife with hypocrisy and lies.
Examples of responses we love:
“Gratitude” by Cornelius Eady Gratitude | The Poetry Foundation
“Wild Geese,” by Mary Oliver. https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/09/24/mary-oliver-reads-wild-geese/ While you don’t have to be ‘good,’ what do you need or want to express the power of love?
In addition, scholar/philosopher/literary giant bell hooks’ statements of love provided particular inspiration for CAPITAL LOVE, and we hope they will also inspire your work, as they speak to the power of love as a force, as action and intention. One quote from her landmark treatise, All About Love, that particularly resonates, and perhaps could inspire your work: “The practice of love is the most powerful antidote to the politics of domination.”
Prompt: How is the practice of love your antidote?
A short and powerful overview of All About Love can be found here:
https://www.themarginalian.org/2023/11/03/bell-hooks-all-about-love/
In short, we hope that, through a literary lens, the power of love will rise and speak our truths.