WWPH WRITES ISSUE 98
WWPH Writes 98… and it’s Q&A for the End of the World, the innovative collaborative poetry collection from Kim Roberts and Michael Gushue, featured in this issue.
We are also celebrating the publication of our first-ever pocket-size anthology, CAPITAL QUEER: A Pride Celebration, which is now available for pre-orders (official pub date is Tuesday, May 27!). Your Washington Writers’ Publishing House will be at the Gathering of Tribes Bookfair/Reading on May 31st; at the World Pride festival on June 7 & 8, and at Kramers Books (launch reading event) on June 10th–all are free and open to all! See below for more details.
And now is your opportunity to be published by your Washington Writers’ Publishing House. Our book-length manuscript contests are open through July 15! We are seeking fiction (short story collections or novels), poetry, or poetry in translation. We are committed to publishing writers who represent the diverse and vibrant communities of the DMV. Details below.
For those planners in our community: TINY POEMS are returning this August to WWPH Writes. This is where we publish lots of TINY POEMS and show them lots of love. This year’s call is for American Haikus with themes of celebration, resilience, and rebellion. See below for more information. Plus, we’re open for prose submissions — especially on the lookout for two summery flash stories–fiction or creative nonfiction!
Lastly, tickets are going fast (they truly are — 25 percent sold out–and they were just made available last week!) for our 50th Anniversary Celebration at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda on Sunday, September 14. This is a rare ticketed event for your Washington Writers’ Publishing House — $50.00 for our 50th ($40 if you are members of the Writer’s Center)– and we are taking over the Writer’s Center with celebratory readings in the theater featuring Grace Cavalieri and E. Ethelbert Miller and more special guests, plus, light refreshments, and festivities!
Tickets are available here and are limited to the number of theater seats.
Read on for Q& A for the End of the World!
Caroline Bock & Jona Colson
co-presidents/editors
WWPH WRITES POETRY
Michael Gushue is co-author of Q&A for the End of the World, with Kim Roberts. He has been published in journals such as the Indiana Review, Third Coast, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Gargoyle, and American Letters and Commentary. His other books of poetry are: Sympathy for the Monster (Alien Buddha Press, 2023), Gather Down Women: Poems and Translations (Souvenir Spoon Books, 2023), Pachinko Mouth (Plan B Press, 2013), Conrad (Souvenir Spoon, 2010), and—in collaboration with CL Bledsoe—The Judy Poems (Ghoti Press, 2021), and I Never Promised You A Sea Monkey (Pretzelcoatl Books, 2017). He co-founded Poetry Mutual Press with Dan Vera, and co-ran a poetry reading series in Brookland and on Capitol Hill, and the series Poetry at the Watergate. He and CL Bledsoe run a column of very bad advice on Medium.com called How To Even. He lives in the Brookland neighborhood of Washington DC.
Kim Roberts is co-author of Q&A for the End of the World, with Michael Gushue. She is the author of two guidebooks, A Literary Guide to Washington, DC: Walking in the Footsteps of American Writers from Francis Scott Key to Zora Neale Hurston (University of Virginia Press, 2018), and Buried Stories: Walking Tours of Washington, DC Cemeteries (Rivanna Books, 2025), and she edited the anthology, By Broad Potomac’s Shore: Great Poems from the Early Days of our Nation’s Capital (University of Virginia Press, 2020, selected by the DC Public Library and East Coast Centers for the Book for the 2021 Route 1 Reads program). She is the author of seven books of poems, including, most recently, another collaboration: Corona/Crown, a cross-disciplinary chapbook created with photographer Robert Revere (WordTech Editions, 2023). Kim co-curates DC Pride Poem-a-Day and coordinates the annual Pride Poets-in-Residence program at the Arts Club of Washington. More at: www.wordtechweb.com/roberts_gushue.html.
AT THE END OF THE WORLD WITH KIM ROBERTS AND MICHAEL GUSHUE
THE WWPH INTERVIEW
By Demitra Moutoudis
Q&A for the End of the World (WordTech, 2025) is a collection of poems from Kim Roberts and Michael Gushue. The collection was inspired by weekly movie nights that the two authors had where they would watch sci-fi films together. Q&A’s structure is a call-and-response, where Robert’s poems pose “questions” about each of the movies while Gushue provides “answers.”
DM: The element of collaboration is very central to Q&A. In what way does the collection speak for the art that collaborative efforts can produce?
Kim: Both of us have written books in collaboration with others before, and I don’t know that a lot of poets are doing these kinds of collaborations. But both of us are drawn to it.
Michael: If you’d asked me ten years ago, I would have said, “I don’t even understand how something like poetry can be collaborative, since it’s so personal.”
Kim: I never would have thought I’d be doing back-to-back collaborative things. For me, a lot of that is a direct consequence of the pandemic, and wanting to feel like I just wanted to connect more with other artists whose work I admired, and collaboration is one way to do that.
Working with someone else sort of pulls you out of yourself, and you end up doing stuff that you normally wouldn’t.
Michael: You can’t underestimate community and collaboration, and those kinds of things that link us together. It’s so important.
JOIN them at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda for a free and open to all reading on Saturday, June 21st at 2 pm. RSVP here.
PURCHASE a copy of Q&A FOR THE END OF WORLD here Read on to a sample for Q&A FOR THE END OF THE WORLD, reprinted with permission of the authors.
WWPH NEWS
CAPITAL QUEER: A PRIDE CELEBRATION FROM WASHINGTON WRITERS’ PUBLISHING is our first-ever pocket-size anthology and we are so excited! The publication date is May 27th. NOW AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDERS everywhere books are sold. We will have them for sale at the Gathering of the Tribes Bookfest/Reading on May 31st at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library in DC and at the World Pride festival on June 7 & 8th (stop by our table!)
Our launch for CAPITAL QUEER is at KRAMERS Bookstore in Washington DC on Tuesday, June 10 from 7-8 pm. Free and open to all, but please RSVP and let us know you are coming! RSVP here. Jona Colson, Kim Roberts, Luke Sutherland, Dwayne Lawson-Brown, Sunu P. Chandy, and Piérre Ramon Thomas will headline this fabulous first reading!
Join us on Monday, June 30th from 7-10 pm at Rhizome DC for our first WWPH Literary Salon of 2025. Our WWPH Literary Salon: PRIDE Edition will be a three-hour fete of creative writing workshops, readings, and free-wheeling discussion–free and open to all. An RSVP is required (space is limited to 50- so, sign up now). Co-editors Jona Colson and Caroline Bock will host the event, poets KIM ROBERTS and DR. TONEE MAE MOLL will lead the creative writing workshop part of the Salon–and many writers from Capital Queer will read from our new anthology — all in a celebration of Pride!
RSVP here for our WWPH Literary Salon: PRIDE Edition, which is made possible by a grant from the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities.
Stop by our table at one of these upcoming events. Learn more about publishing with us…our book-length manuscript contests are now open! We are eager to read your poetry, fiction (novel or short story collection), and poetry in translation.
2025 MANUSCRIPT CONTESTS are now open! If you are considering submitting your book-length manuscript to WWPH, check out our guidelines and FAQs (new for 2025!) here.
We are excited to be part of A GATHERING OF THE TRIBES: Bookfair & Open Mic on Saturday, May 31st…stop by our table for a special Capital Queer mini-gift (limited supplies!)…the Open Mic is hosted by our own Jona Colson!
INSIDER’S NEWS… our very popular TINY POEMS are returning this August. We are looking for AMERICAN HAIKUS. We will publish many in our two August issues! Find out more here. Submissions open June 1.
Please join our founder, Grace Cavalieri, E. Ethelbert Miller, and many more in celebrating the life and poetry of one of the past presidents of the Washington Writers’ Publishing House, Elisavietta Ritchie, on Saturday, June 7th, from 2-4 at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda. More about this remarkable poet and literary citizen here. Free and open to all. Please RSVP here.
WWPH WRITES is open for submissions! We now pay $25.00 for poetry (up to 3 poems) and prose (up to 1,000 words of fiction or creative nonfiction–and we only have only 4 open slots for prose remaining for 2025!) Free to submit! And Caroline is especially seeking summery flash fiction or creative nonfiction to publish in July. More details at our Submittable page here.
Thank you for being part of the Washington Writers’ Publishing House’s community. Here’s to a meaningful Memorial Day for us all!