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. Had a poem chosen for the 2026 Midwest Haiku Traveling Rock Garden.
2. Submitted fifteen poems to Modern Haiku and had one accepted.
3. Submitted fifteen poems to Acorn and had one accepted.
4. Read poems during Frogpond‘s submission period in my role as one of the journal’s haiku/senryu co-editors.
5. Submitted two poems to The Solitary Daisy and had both rejected.
6. Received an invitation from Red Moon Press to submit work to their next A New Resonance anthology and submitted approximately 80 poems for consideration (they ask for 75-100!).
7. Submitted a commissioned essay for a forthcoming collection about Mennonot.
8. Submitted five poems to Frogpond.
9. Had three poems published in #FemkuMag 42 (Summer 2026).
Daniel Shank Cruz 