THE WASHINGTON WRITERS’ PUBLISHING HOUSE
TO BEGIN PUBLISHING THE ICONIC
GRACE & GRAVITY SERIES
Literary institution in the DC area champions women writers
12th volume to open for submissions in August, 2026
Washington, DC—Monday, May 25, 2026— Washington Writers’ Publishing House, a nonprofit cooperative literary press based in Washington, DC since 1975, will begin publishing the iconic Grace & Gravity anthology series, it was announced today.
Published for the last eight years under novelist, professor, and editor Melissa Scholes Young, the Grace & Gravity series was founded by legendary writer and editor Richard Peabody in 2004 to champion women writers. Over the past 20-plus years, 11 issues have featured over 500 women prose writers, a who’s who of the DC area.
Grace & Gravity: Volume 12 from the Washington Writers’ Publishing House will open for short prose (fiction or literary nonfiction) this August with a target publication date of May 2027. Caroline Bock, co-president/prose editor at WWPH, will serve as the series editor. In keeping with the tradition of Grace & Gravity, each anthology will be published biannually and will feature a specific theme (still to be announced for the 2027 issue!).
In a new development for the series, each volume will also have a guest editor. The first guest editor will be Melanie S. Hatter. She is the author of Malawi’s Sisters, which was selected by Edwidge Danticat as the winner of the inaugural Kimbilio National Fiction Prize and was published by Four Way Books in 2019. Her debut novel, The Color of My Soul, won the 2011 Washington Writers’ Publishing House Fiction Prize.
Melissa Scholes Young noted, “It’s been my honor to edit the series and to receive support from our literary community. Publishing the last four volumes of Grace & Gravity has been a truly collaborative effort; I’m grateful to nonfiction editor Wendy Besel Hahn and managing editor Lindsay Forbes-Brown, as well as American University students in my Literary Editing & Publishing class. I’ll always be a part of the Grace & Gravity sisterhood, and I’m looking forward to celebrating it in its new home at WWPH!”
“We are thrilled to be able to continue the tradition of the Grace & Gravity series and build on the community that Melissa and Richard created for women writers in DC. We aim to raise up and celebrate diverse, women-identifying writers from across DC, Maryland, and Virginia in the anthology, and hopefully, to discover new voices, as well as bring readers across the nation to Grace & Gravity,” added Caroline Bock.
For the first time, Grace & Gravity will be published as an ebook as well as in trade paperback, and will be available to bookstores across the country. The Washington Writers’ Publishing House will also continue to manage the website and social media for the Grace & Gravity series established by Melissa Scholes Young, including its popular “From the Attic” features, which highlight previously published Grace & Gravity authors and their prose.
The Washington Writers’ Publishing House has had much success in recent years publishing anthologies, including a new series of pocket-sized anthologies in its ‘Capital’ series, edited by co-presidents Caroline Bock and Jona Colson, including: Capital Queer (2025), Capital Love (2025), and the just-announced Capital Translation (2027). In 2025, WWPH published AMERICA’S FUTURE: poetry & prose in response to tomorrow, a landmark 50th-anniversary anthology featuring 164 writers and 179 works of poetry and prose. In 2021, This Is What America Looks Like featured 100 writers.
Washington Writers’ Publishing House is a nonprofit, cooperative literary organization that has published over 100 volumes of poetry since 1975, as well as fiction and literary nonfiction. The press sponsors annual competitions for writers living in DC, Maryland, and Virginia, and the winners of each category (poetry, fiction, and literary nonfiction or translation in alternate years) comprise our winter slate. In 2021, WWPH launched an online literary journal, WWPH WRITES, to expand our mission to further the creative work of writers in our region. In 2024, WWPH launched its biennial Works in Translation series. More about the Washington Writers’ Publishing House at www.washingtonwriters.org.
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Media contact:
Cherrie Woods
cwoodspr@gmail.com