Meet the Yellow Arrow Publishing 2025 chapbook authors
From 2020 to 2024, Yellow Arrow Publishing has had the privilege of publishing 14 chapbooks (for information about the creative minds behind these collections, visit yellowarrowpublishing.com/publish-with-us). Some of our authors published their first books with us while others had gotten their feet wet in the past but wanted to dive into something slightly different and more intimate. Several are from the Baltimore area while others are from all over the United States, with one author (shout out to Roz Weaver . . . are guinea pig and first chapbook author) from England. We’ve learned so much over the years and grown with each writer, figuring out with each book how to best support our authors. With 2025, we were looking for collections that sang to us, made us cry, made us commiserate, made us proud.
In two rounds over several months, we read through the beautiful submissions we received, first creating a longlist, then shortlist, and eventually selecting the three authors we would love to work with in 2025. It was difficult to email submitters to let them know our decision (writing an acceptance email is as hard as a decline as you never know how either message will be received), but the process is done, and we are so excited to work with the three chosen.
So, without further ado, let’s meet the 2025 Yellow Arrow chapbook authors!
Ann marie Houghtailing
Little by Little
coming April 2025
Ann marie Houghtailing has an ALM in American Literature from Harvard University Extension. She has delivered a TEDx Talk entitled Raising Humans and performed her critically acclaimed one woman show, Renegade Princess, in New York, Chicago, Santa Fe, San Francisco, and San Diego. Houghtailing is a visual artist and cofounder of the firm, Story Imprinting. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Huffington Post, Daily Worth, XO Jane, San Diego Business Journal, Yahoo! Finance, and Thought Catalog.
Find her on Instagram @trailsnotpaths and on Facebook and LinkedIn @annmariehoughtailing.
About Little by Little: “Little by little” is the phrase my mother used to say when things were hard. Things were almost always hard. I grew up in a culture of poverty and witnessed violence, struggle, and wild resilience everyday. What I did not know was that my mother’s phrase would become a life affirming strategy. It was a map that took me back to myself when life took so much from me. From 2019–2020 four members of my family, including my mother, died in rapid succession. Their deaths would be an extension of historic and epigenetic trauma that would require me to sit inside of suffering and paint, write, and garden my way through to transformation. This collection, Little by Little, seeks to explore the universality of human suffering and how we find our way to meaning and purpose. Everyday we experience loss. The loss of innocence, youth, relationships, jobs, money, confidence, power, life, and hope are in constant play. Learning to sit inside of deep suffering can be intellectually, emotionally, and physically demanding territory that invites us to examine who we are and what we’re made of. Little by Little is a way to see, a way to suffer, and ultimately live.
Why is it important to you to have your voice heard and amplified?
Just as there is generational wealth, there is generational poverty. I was raised by a mother who grew up on a sugar cane plantation in Waialua, O’ahu. My mother was born when Hawai’i was still a territory of the U.S. This story is completely absent in American culture consciousness. My mother raised me on a pharmacy clerk’s hourly wage and when she died I didn’t inherit property or expensive jewelry; I inherited her stories that are etched in my bones. Stories that will die if I don’t tell them. I’m also a postmenopausal woman, which means that in midlife I’m invisible, pushed to the margins in our youth obsessed culture And finally, I’ve had a long history of staggering loss; 2019–2020 was a particularly devastating year. I produced all the poetry in Little by Little in a period of deep grief. I lost four members of my family in one year. The intersection of these elements of my experience informs the way I see and process the world. Poverty, death, and middle age are not always the subject matter of my writing, but my writing cannot be separated from these truths that have shaped me.
What made you decide to submit this chapbook to Yellow Arrow Publishing this year?
Candace Walsh [author of Iridescent Pigeons, published by Yellow Arrow in 2024] posted the call for submissions. The publication of Iridescent Pigeons was beautiful, and I had a shock of bravery that inspired me to submit my work that had been swimming in the amniotic fluid of grief for several years.
Emily Decker
Homing
coming July 2025
Emily Decker was born in Virginia, on the Chesapeake Bay, and spent her childhood in Ghana and her growing-up years in Atlanta, Georgia. She holds degrees in literature and secondary English education from Georgia State University, and her poetry has appeared in Yellow Arrow Journal, Full Bleed, Hole in the Head Review, and Bay to Ocean Journal. Decker currently resides in Baltimore, Maryland, where she also loves to participate in local theater, sing, and sail. Homing is her first collection.
Find her on Instagram and Facebook @emadeck.
About Homing: Where is home? All my life, this question has been a complicated one to answer. I can tell you where I was born, where I spent my childhood, where I’ve lived the most, and where I live now. But home? I’m not sure. Is it a location? Or is it found within the communities and relationships where we feel loved, safe, part of something outside of ourselves? Does it change? And what about the times when we don’t know where—or if—to return? The search for these answers is what led to the poems in this collection. At its core, Homing is an exploration of the transitory nature of belonging and its innate role in our desire for home, even as we try to define it. These poems reflect on the interconnectedness of the paths we take and the moments along the way—between tides and seasons, in nature, amidst love and friendship, within memory and loss, over generations, and most of all, within ourselves—as we seek, find, and return to a place called home.
Why is it important to you to have your voice heard and amplified?
I don’t think it’s important to have my voice heard, per se. But I do hope my poems represent many voices—ones that don’t always know how to be heard but are searching for ways to have their experiences reflected back to them, on a page, in an image, in metaphor. The poet Eavan Boland once wrote that “at the end of the day, what matters is language. Is the unspoken at the edge of the spoken.” If amplifying my words helps someone connect language to their own, perhaps unspoken, search for home and belonging, then I’m happy to be part of the great host of writers bridging the gap between the spoken and unspoken.
What made you decide to submit this chapbook to Yellow Arrow Publishing this year?
Yellow Arrow Journal’s KINDLING issue (2023) was the home of my first published poem and since then [Yellow Arrow] has held a special place in my heart. I also wanted to finish and submit this chapbook before I turned 40 this past September—as a sort of capstone to my 30s. Aging is such a complicated process of self-discovery and acceptance for a woman, and Yellow Arrow’s women-amplifying, community-driven mission further underscored my choice to submit this collection—another first publication—to them.
Vic Nogay
Naming a Dying Thing
coming October 2025
Vic Nogay is a Pushcart Prize and Best Microfiction nominated writer from Ohio. Her work has been published in Gone Lawn, Tiny Molecules, Fractured Lit, Lost Balloon, and other journals. She is the author of the micropoetry chapbook under fire under water (tiny wren, 2022) and the microeditor of Identity Theory. Find her online @vicnogaywrites or haunting rural roadsides where the wildflowers grow.
About Naming a Dying Thing: Naming a Dying Thing is a collection of poems rooted in place, in loss, and in reckoning. Much of the content is sieved through native Ohio wildlife imagery of all seasons, though primarily summer. This is a sticky collection, like humid Ohio summers, often wistful and lovely, but also heavy and heightened. The primary struggle in this body of work is with womanhood, motherhood—how to be a woman and a mother in a society demanding we be somehow everything and nothing all at once. These poems also contemplate and subvert success and failure in love, holding a marriage up to the concurrent events of our hostile American reality. There are no answers here. Topics include pregnancy, motherhood, miscarriage, child loss, abortion, reproductive injustices, gun violence, climate change, marriage, relationships, memory, and the hidden intersections I'm finding between them and the native Ohio wildlife near my home.
Why is it important to you to have your voice heard and amplified?
Sharing my voice is self-sovereignty, it’s how I choose to take up space, to let my little life unfurl beyond itself, catching the wind if only for a moment.
What made you decide to submit this chapbook to Yellow Arrow Publishing this year?
I love that Yellow Arrow is a nonprofit publisher committed to championing cis and trans women writers. I knew my poems and I would be safe and supported in this exemplary community.
We can’t wait to work with Ann marie, Emily, and Vic next year and put out there beautiful collections but would like to acknowledge all the incredible collections we received this summer. Thank you to everyone who submitted and shared. In particular, we would love to give a shout out to both our longlisted (part of the top 25) and shortlisted authors (part of the top 11).
Meet our shortlisted authors:
Rachel R. Baum
Melanie Hyo-In Han
Kathleen Hellen
Beth Kanter
Beth Konkoski
Elina Kumra
Pia Taavila-Borsheim
Bethany Tap
Meet our longlisted authors:
Torey Akers
Jody Brooks
Hannah Burns
Alyx Chandler
Jenn Frayer-Griggs
Victoria Grageda-Smith
Jennifer Grant
Jamie Hennick
Arya F. Jenkins
Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka
Kathryn LeBey
Elizabeth Sine
Sam VanNorden
Thank you to everyone who took the time to send your words to us. Every writer has a story to tell and every story is worth telling. We are so proud of everyone we publish at Yellow Arrow.
Yellow Arrow Publishing is a nonprofit supporting women-identifying writers through publication and access to the literary arts. You can support us as we AMPLIFY women-identifying creatives this year by purchasing one of our publications or a workshop from the Yellow Arrow bookstore, for yourself or as a gift, joining our newsletter, following us on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, or subscribing to our YouTube channel. Donations are appreciated via PayPal (staff@yellowarrowpublishing.com), Venmo (@yellowarrowpublishing), or US mail (PO Box 65185, Baltimore, Maryland 21209). More than anything, messages of support through any one of our channels are greatly appreciated.