With support from the California Arts Council, Women Who Submit will host seven free public career development workshops led by local professional women-identifying and nonbinary writers for the advancement of local underrepresented women-identifying and nonbinary writers. These workshops and community cowork events are inspired by Vida, Women in Literary Arts, and the VIDA Count. They are organized as an action for gender parity in literary publishing.
WWS offers free public workshops lead by local, professional writers and orientations to submission strategies every other month. Topics for these workshops have included applying for academic jobs, applying for artist workshops, residencies and fellowships, strategies for submitting to contests, strategies for performing in public, pitching an essay, and strategies for writing while mothering. We also host private submission parties aka community coworking events on the off months for our members in private homes around Los Angeles. These submission parties are the core vision of our organization. In 2009, Vida, Women in Literary Arts published the first VIDA Count, which gave quantitative evidence of the disparity between men and women representation in top tier journals. The “submission party” was created as an action to change those numbers by creating a safe and supportive space for women and nonbinary writers to share resources and submit their work with community support.