Yellow Arrow Journal is a biannual publication of creative nonfiction, poetry, and cover art by writers and artists who identify as women.

About Yellow Arrow Journal

Please meet the guest editor for Yellow Arrow Journal Vol. XI, No. 1, Heather Brown Barrett. Hear from Heather herself about her focus of the next issue, which will explore the interplay between curiosity and creativity and how it informs discovery in the personal creative process and encourages artistry and fulfillment for women-identifying writers.

yellowarrowpublishing.com/news/curiosity-creativity-guest-editor-yaj-xi-01-barrett

Heather Brown Barrett is an award-winning poet in southeastern Virginia. She mothers her young son and contemplates life, the universe, and everything with her writer husband. She is a Cherokee Nation citizen, the membership chair of The Poetry Society of Virginia, a member of The Muse Writers Center, and a former board member of Hampton Roads Writers. Her work has appeared in Literary Mama, The Ekphrastic Review, Yellow Arrow Journal, formidable Woman sanctuary, Black Bough Poetry, OyeDrum Magazine, and elsewhere and has been nominated for Best of the Net. Her poetry is featured in the global TELEPHONE exhibition and was previously featured on the Dahlgren Railroad Heritage Trail as part of The Poetry Society of Virginia’s Poetry on the Trail project and in the Suffolk Center for Cultural Arts Everyone Has a Story exhibit. Much of her work is influenced by themes and dualities of motherhood, modes of forgiveness and grace, and the types of subjects that plague most poets, like death, grocery stores, and birds. She’s the author of Water in Every Room (Kelsay Books, 2025), a collection of poems embodying the fluctuations of emotion and form in new motherhood.

The theme will be announced shortly. For more information on how to submit to the issue, visit our submissions page. Submissions will be open February 1–28. Yellow Arrow Journal’s Vol. X, No. 2 issue (fall 2025) on KAIROS is available as a paperback and a PDF from the Yellow Arrow bookstore. You can also find KAIROS through most online distributors.

You can find all our publications in the Yellow Arrow bookstore and through most other distributors, in Baltimore and beyond. Support the journal by ordering a discounted bundle of the 2025 (Vol. X: UNFURL and KAIROS) issues, for yourself, for your office, or as a gift. Bundles of volumes VIII (2023 KINDLING and EMBLAZON) and IX (2024 ELEVATE and kitalo) are also available. Learn more about our bundles at yellowarrowpublishing.com/store/yellow-arrow-journal-bundle.

Thank you to all who submitted and shared. For more information on how to submit to the next (spring 2026) issue, visit our submissions page. Submissions (theme TBA) are open February 1–28.

Meet the Guest Editors

Editorial statement

At Yellow Arrow Publishing, we pride ourselves on nontraditional publishing methods that align with our nontraditional publishing company. We seek to uplift underrepresented voices and to allow women-identifying writers to exist and be heard exactly as they are.

We believe that publishing is a vehicle for storytelling and that each storyteller should have the freedom to tell the truest version of their story. This means that we don’t focus on common style guides and norms and that we don’t change our authors’ voices into something they are not.

While we provide a basic copyedit of each journal issue, manuscript, and chapbook that we publish, we prioritize maintaining the unique voice and style of each of our authors. Instead of fixating on grammar perfection (though we will fix errant commas), we focus on the heart of each piece: we want the ideas, themes, and styles of our writers to shine.

We believe that every writer has a story to tell and that every story is worth telling.

We want every writer we publish to come out of the process feeling heard, valued, and needed.

We believe that your story matters. That you matter.

And we want you to be heard.

Kapua Iao, Editor-in-Chief

JOURNAL ISSUES: FROM JOURNEY (VOL. I) TO KAIROS (VOL. X)