YellowJacket Press

Hello Florida Poets! ☀️ 📝We are so excited to announce that submissions for the 2026 YellowJacket Press Chapbook Competition will open on April 1st! ⭐ We can't wait to read your collections, and we wish you all creative success! Thank you to Keep St. Pete Lit for being our fiscal sponsor, and thanks for all the support from our poetic community! 📖🖊️✨✨✨

BIG congratulations to the Winner of the 2025 YellowJacket Press Chapbook contest, Cari Oleskewicz for her chapbook, Ocala: Poems from Horse Country and Beyond!!! 🎉🎉🎉 We are so excited for her to share her poems at her launch at Poetry Open Mic Night at Studio 620 on February 4th at 7 pm! See you there! ❤️

In honor of National Poetry Month, the Wordsmith of the city is throwing down a challenge to all you other wordsmiths and poets. Write a poem—Tell it!—about our fair city, Tampa, otherwise known as T-Town, the Big Guava, Gasparilla Queen, Home of the Bolts, Super Bowl Host-with-the-Most, —whatever you like to call her. Think about it. Poems about places are ubiquitous....

A Poetry Challenge for National Poetry Month In honor of National Poetry Month, the Wordsmith of the city is throwing down a challenge to all you other wordsmiths and poets. Write a poem—Tell it!—about our fair city, Tampa, otherwise known as…

Wellswood, 1960s No midnight mass. Just a star in the punk tree. My sisters and I put on velvet pantsuits our mother made. It took her months, the lace on the wrists. Red, maroon, aquamarine. My mother blonde-rinsed her hair, coated her long nails in Pearl. She wore a silver caftan and lovely rings— amber topaz and a gold B....

Christmas Eve had a Hundred Blue Lights Wellswood, 1960s No midnight mass. Just a star in…

I am excited to post Dailies written by other poets: Two by Mary Jane Ryals, Poet Laureate of Florida's Big Bend: Voting Day 11/3/2020 Sun tricks pine straw into golden. Branches are veins squirrels run down. I know only this today. Late Afternoon, Fall The last tiger striped and monarch butterflies touch down on red lantana. Sky will jilt us…...

The Daily has legs! I am excited to post Dailies written by other poets: Two by Mary Jane Ryals, Poet Laureate of Florida’s Big Bend: Voting Day 11/3/2020 Sun tricks  pine straw into golden.  Bran…

A new poetry form created in a fit of inadequate self-confidence and creative desperation! This is a new form that I created in October 2020. Well, at least, I have never seen this form before. Feeling stressed and overwhelmed by the world, but wanting and needing to produce work during my sabbatical, I came up with something I thought would be "too small to fail" (in the words of Ariana Huffington....

The Daily A new poetry form created in a fit of inadequate self-confidence and creative desperation! This is a new form that I created in October 2020. Well, at least, I have never seen this form before. F…

2020: The world has changed. Suffering, loss, fear, isolation are the constants all around us and in our lives. But there is still joy. Still art. Still humanity, compassion and caring for others. I've been keeping a "pandemic journal" since mid-March and was posting nearly daily posts on "The Joys of Stay at Home" on Facebook for 5 or 6 weeks. [ 280 more words ]

Posts from the Pandemic 2020: The world has changed. Suffering, loss, fear, isolation are the constants all around us and in our lives. But there is still joy. Still art. Still humanity, compassion and caring for others. …