Let’s meet the 2024 Yellow Arrow chapbook authors!
Isabel Cristina Legarda - Beyond the Galleons (APRIL 2024)
Isabel Cristina Legarda was born in the Philippines and spent her early childhood there before moving to Bethesda, Maryland. She holds degrees in literature and bioethics and is currently a practicing physician in Boston. She enjoys writing about women’s lived experience, cultural issues, and finding grace in a challenging world. Her work has appeared in America Magazine, Cleaver Magazine, The Dewdrop, The Lowestoft Chronicle, Ruminate, Sky Island Review, Smartish Pace, Qu, West Trestle Review, and others. Find Isabel on Instagram and Twitter @poetintheOR.
Beyond the Galleons is a meditation on Filipino experiences of colonization, language conflict, loss of homeland, finding footing in new homes, ancestral connection, family, alienation, cultural agility, and the ghosts that haunt people living in geographic or psychologic diasporas. The poems within contemplate longing and resilience, and the need to hold fast to memory even while moving forward beyond pain. It is Isabel’s hope that this small collection can become part of the diasporic voices and joined multicultural histories that are not currently so well known or talked about.
Candace Walsh - Iridescent Pigeons (July 2024)
Candace Walsh is a PhD candidate in creative writing at Ohio University. She holds an MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson College. Recent/forthcoming publication credits include for poetry, Sinister Wisdom, Vagabond City Lit, and HAD; for fiction, The Greensboro Review, Passengers Journal, and Leon Literary Review; and for creative nonfiction, March Danceness, New Limestone Review, and Pigeon Pages. Her craft essays and book reviews have appeared in Brevity, descant, New Mexico Magazine, and Fiction Writers Review. She coedits Quarter After Eight literary journal. Find her on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @candacewalsh.
Queer love, so often mischaracterized, contains multitudes. The poems within Iridescent Pigeons represent it in romantic, maternal, filial, platonic, symbiotic, erotic, and sylvan modes. They also hold love and loss in cupped hands. We are mortal; so is love. We have life spans; so does love, whether measured in dog years, golden anniversaries, or the number of hours of a tryst that will expire at dawn. Amid the loss, retrieval and rebirth stir within the included poems that inhabit and annex traditional and endangered forms, such as a [William] Wordsworthian ode, an homage to Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty,” a cento composed of phrases from Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, and a triptych of Sapphic stanzas.
Julie Alden Cullinane - Ghosts Only I Can See (October 2024)
Julie Alden Cullinane is a poet, author, neurodivergent, and mom in Boston. Her first publication was a poem in The Boston Globe at age 8; she has been writing ever since. After raising a family and working full time for many years as a young mom, she was able to return to her graduate studies later in life and earned her master’s in 2021, during the pandemic. Under the guidance of many amazing and supportive female professors, she began submitting her work for publication. She has published poems and short stories in 20+ literary magazines since 2020. She currently works in academia full time when she is not writing. Julie’s focus of writing is often on the untold seasons and shades of a woman’s life. She loves to highlight the dichotomy of the modern pressures on women and mothers, between having a successful career and an expected perfect domestic life. Her favorite writers are Eavan Boland and Anne Enright. When she is not writing she enjoys long naps on the couch with her beloved dog. She is currently knee-deep in a midlife crisis. It takes up all her time. She will definitely be writing about it. Find Julie at julie.wildinkpages.com/poetry or on Instagram or Threads @HerLoudMind and Twitter or Blue Sky @AldenCullinane.
Ghosts Only I Can See is a look back into the past, present, and future of women’s lives. It focuses not on literal ghosts, but the ghosts of our former selves as we navigate the world as women. Growing up in a world filled with many amazing, strong women, I was an avid spectator of their lives, their passions, and their trauma. Only when I was older and began experiencing life myself did I realize the tender weaving of women’s lives and the multitude of shared experiences that often do not get told because of societal shame and the pressures of perfection put upon them. But women have universal yet intimate experiences that are better understood when shared, which is why this collection of poetry and creative nonfiction peeks back in time to my younger self, the ghosts through time that only I can see. Ghosts Only I Can See unites and shares the painful and wonderful experiences of what is means to be a modern woman.