This past February I was delighted to receive my 100th anthology acceptance from Cowboy Jamboree for their Songs to Woody anthology which will be out sometime this fall. Folk music played a huge role in influencing my writing style and musical taste since I was a child. No. 101 was These Poems Kill Fascists by Like a Blot from the Blue in Scotland. I managed to achieve this milestone in a mere 8.25 years. The Internet has made possible a bibliography that would have been far more difficult in the 20th century when I first began writing poetry.
My first anthology acceptance was for A Poet’s Siddur by Ain’t Got No Press. I then got into some local anthologies by the Benicia First Tuesday Poets and the Marin Poetry Center. My fourth anthology was my poet laureate project that I edited, Verses, Voices, & Visions of Vallejo. (Even if you were to subtract the three anthologies that I edited, I will still reach the 100th publication milestone in 2026.)
As the world shut down in the spring of 2020 and solitude replaced performing, I began focusing on becoming more traditionally published, seeking out submission calls beyond the local poetry circles of the Bay Area.
I was waking up at 4 AM when the house was quiet, making myself a cup of tea, seeking out calls for submission on social media, and challenging myself to write on demand about a variety of subjects. I soon found numerous publishers that had shared interests, calling for poetry on subjects that I already enjoyed writing about such as social justice and music. This went on until the world opened back up sometime in 2021.
It proved that people whom I’d never met enjoyed reading my poetry. It gave me some literary validation beyond the kind words of friends and dues paid to local clubs. I soon went from being published in California to across the United States to around the world. By the end of 2020 I was published multiple times in Kenya and England. In 2021 I added Australia, Israel, and Canada. In 2022, India. In 2024, Spain and Scotland. I made connections that occasionally lead to performances such as with the Woody Guthrie Poets and in the case of Poetry is Dead, an editing opportunity.
I used to add my publication credits to both my Amazon author page and my Poets & Writers directory listing. However, both of these are limited listings. Amazon only lets you list books that they sell, and P&W doesn’t have every publisher listed in its database. I originally listed them so that the small indie publishers who produced the anthology may get a few more sales, benefitting all contributors. However, the anthologies quickly outgrew my own self-published titles both in sales and number.
Adding books that I have merely contributed to rather than authored on such listings has also caused some confusion, so I stopped listing them. In the rash of AI-generated fake book club spam emails that I talk about in this post, the scammers often scrape the description of one of the top-selling anthologies on my Amazon listing for their sales pitch.
Since the design of the Amazon author page makes no distinction between my own books and books for which I merely contributed a few poems to a collective project, the robots are frequently getting it wrong. I made the mistake of responding once in 2025, saying, “This is not my book. Please remove me from your mailing list.” only to receive an onslaught of these fake offers near daily.
Dear newly minted robot overloads, I’m not interested in your book clubs nor review gimmicks. I self-publish my own collections merely to preserve my writings for personal reasons. The terms poetry book and well-funded advertising budget are rarely ever used in the same sentence.
The indie publishers who publish my work and the work of other contemporary poets are a far better targeted advertisement than I could ever get on the dying halls of the bot-infested algorithms of the social Internet, lounging between memes and headlines on the timelines of people who prefer their poetry to be byte-sized and meme-like. Anthologies land in the right hands–people who enjoy reading poetry, sitting on the shelves of all of the poets who contributed in cities across the globe.
Submitting to anthology publishers also seems like a better investment of my time and money now a days than giving my income to the oil companies at 6$ a gallon to go read somewhere for five minutes for free. I have a lovely collection of paperback books to show for it.