For the second year in a row, Saw Palm was awarded Best of the Bay - Best local literary journal by Creative Loafing and Creative Loafing readers! We are thrilled and honored to be a part of the fantastic Tampa Bay literary scene! Congratulations to all of the winners, including former poetry editor Gloria Munoz who won best local poet!!

We are now accepting submissions for Issue #9 until October 1!! 

Review our guidelines at sawpalm.org/submit

Submit your work to https://sawpalm.submittable.com/submit

If you have questions, feel free to contact an editor at [email protected]

New Places to Stand pieces are up.  Take a little tour!  Start on Sanibel Island with three spectacularly good poems from William Greenway: "Blind Pass," "The Dharma Beach Bums," and "Fishing with Faust."  Then cross the sound to Pine Island for Russell Shatto's Moment of Zen featuring a Calusa burial mound and Vivaldi, "A Pineland Sunset."  Next, head up the coast to just north of Tampa Bay and catch Michael A. Quinn's "People Watching at Dunedin Causeway," which plays a little memory trick on the reader.  Finally, jump over and up to the Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine and read Mary Anna Evans' "Grieving for the Timucua."  Evans is a winner of the Florida Historical Society's Patrick D. Smith Florida Literature Award.  

Enjoy your tour.  Don't hesitate to click on other pushpins along the way.  And look, the East Coast is empty between St. Augustine and Hollywood.  So is most of the interior.  We need people to go stand in these places (or sit, or lie down) and tell us what they're like.  Summer assignment for everyone.

Go to Places to Stand in Florida here!

There was a lot of karaoke at our release party for Saw Palm Volume 8! Here are a few pictures from the event.

We are proud to announce that the Spring 2014 issue of Saw Palm will be released on February 7th. It's a tradition at Saw Palm to hold a release party to celebrate each new issue, so come join us for karaoke and drinks and meet the many talented artists, writers, and poets from our latest issue at 6pm Friday, Feb. 7th at Gaspar's Patio Bar and Grill located at 8448 North 56th Street in Tampa, just a short drive from the USF campus.

By now, every literary type who frequents the interwebs has probably seen VIDA’s survey of women in literary publications. The numbers aren’t good. Apparently, of the major publications like The New Yorker, Harpers, and The Paris Review, only Tin House is not sexist. Every other major literary publication has a significant deficit of female writers, whether we are talking about short fiction that appears in the magazine, the authors of books reviewed by the magazine, or the book reviewers themselves.

Saw Palm was not included in VIDA's study, but when we saw these statistics, we couldn’t help but worry a little. Were we just as bad as the big magazines?

Well, we went through all seven past issues and tallied up the numbers. On average, each issue of Saw Palm publishes 37 pieces from 26 contributors -- 12 men and 14 women. So women actually appear in the journal more often then men! Not only that, but of 6 managing editors, 4 have been women, and we have had more women than men hold editorial positions overall.

In a recent article on Flavorwire about the VIDA results, the editors of Tin House described how they did an analysis of their contributors, found women to be under-represented and worked diligently to encourage women to submit. Such diligence is commendable, but it should not have been necessary in the first place.  What I'm most proud of is that Saw Palm achieved gender equality both within its pages and in the editorial room without consciously making an effort to do so. This speaks to the leadership of our advisory editor, John Henry Fleming, the culture of the journal that has developed under his guidance, and to our past managing editors: Daniele Pantano, Alicia Thompson, Jim Miller, Jaquira Diaz, Gloria Munoz, and Christine Lasek.

Where will you travel on the Places to Stand map today?  15 new Places to Stand pieces have just been posted, from the Panhandle to the Everglades!  Many thanks for the submissions from Allie Marini Batts, Doug Alderson, Diana Woodcock, Julie Marie Wade, Greg Sullivan, Elisabeth Lanser-Rose, John Gifford, Jenny Crowley, Heraid Castillo, Danita Berg, and Phillip Barron.

Want to go stand somewhere in Florida and write about what it's like?  Saw Palm reads Places to Stand in Florida pieces throughout the year.  Send us something 500 words or less, including poetry (as long as the formatting is simple).  GPS coordinates are helpful but not necessary.  Help us fill the map with beautiful words.