Since January 2021, I’ve been keeping a list of my writing activity for each month (here’s last month’s). I do so partly as a form of encouragement for myself to show that I am still able to do some writing despite the energy-sucking terrors of our times, and partly as an archive that I can look back on in the future. As such, I include negative happenings (e.g., receiving rejections), not just positive ones.
I think that it is important for me to share my list publicly as a genderqueer bisexual disabled Latinx writer because mainstream discourse tries to either pretend voices such as mine do not exist or actively tries to suppress them. Whether one is part of an oppressed group or not, writing is an essential act of resistance in these terrible times (WHICH ARE ESPECIALLY TERRIBLE IN THE U.S.A. RIGHT NOW–make no mistake, the current “presidential” administration is a fascist one), so I hope that my list offers encouragement to others.
The list is basically in chronological order.
1. Submitted eight poems to #FemkuMag and had three accepted.
2. Had a poem accepted by Mariposa.
3. Submitted six previously-published poems to the Midwest Traveling Haiku Rock Garden, which has a baseball theme this year.
4. Had two poems published in Kingfisher 13 (April 2026).
5. Had a poem, “crossing the street the constellation of stickers on the light pole,” published in Blithe Spirit 36, no. 2 (May 2026).
6. Received a positive review of a good possible year for an apocalypse: poems in Blithe Spirit.
7. Had an entry created for my work in the Living Haiku Anthology.
8. Submitted eight poems to Akitsu Quarterly (my first time submitting to this journal!) and had one accepted.
9. Submitted four poems to this year’s Haiku Society of America Members’ Anthology and heard which one was chosen.
10. Submitted fifteen poems to a new journal, Sundog.
11. Was asked to peer review an article for a journal in one of my fields and said no because I did a quick skim of the article and saw that it did not cite any of the sizeable body of related scholarship, so it wasn’t worth giving the article a detailed reading.
Daniel Shank Cruz 