December 6, 2025

Baltimore Review News: We’re working on selecting a group of contest finalists to send to our final judge, Mandy Moe Pwint Tu: a mix of prose poems, flash fiction, and flash creative nonfiction, about 15 works in all. Planning on sending those to her in the next few days.

And we’ll be working on selecting work for the winter issue. Having those Submittable doors closed doesn’t mean this is a quiet time for us. We have loads of catching up to do!

But we don’t want to be too antisocial during the coming weeks. We’re hoping to offer a generative writing/craft session before we open again on February 1, with some tips about preparing their work for submission. More about that later.

Looking forward to the Eastern Shore Writers Association Holiday Book Festival next Saturday.

On a personal note: The talk at Mercy High School went well. During my 20-minute session, I discussed some aspects of prose poem, micro, and flash fiction forms and read some examples of my work published within the past year or so. My fellow BR staff person read nonfiction—which I’d read a while back (not knowing she was the author) and visited the place she wrote about. Small world. Seriously. Then we had Q&A time, and the students asked some great questions. I left some copies of a handout, “Concision and Precision in Flash Fiction” (notes from an April 2025 BR blog post) and recommended the NewPages Young Writers Guide, which lists journals that publish writers under 18. The BR does not, but there are many fine journals out there that do.

A quiet time for my own writing right now, but I did sign up for one of Francine Witte’s generative writing pop-ups (a present to myself), and those are almost always helpful to me. The sessions have resulted in several published prose poems/micros in the past, so here’s hoping!