First Sale! “Olive Branch”

I’m extremely proud to announce my first fiction sale, “Olive Branch,” to Friends Journal in their annual Quaker Fiction issue. It’s particularly meaningful for me to have my first sale with FJ because they also published my first nonfiction piece, and I hold a strong affinity for the magazine.

A sale to FJ qualifies as professional based on the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) guidelines. It’s a major triumph to punctuate a busy summer and fall, starting with the Nebula Conference in June, where I presented on my first panel, and later that month off to Maine for another MFA residency.

Then I presented my academic paper at the VICFA, and an in-person event to promote Vital with Inlandia Institute at The Maloof, both in October. At the Inlandia event, I actually read “Olive Branch,” which had just been accepted.

This past weekend, in addition to going through FJ‘s copy edits on “Olive Branch” I finished adapting the story as a short play which I will workshop at my last residency in January, and completed and turned in my MFA creative thesis.

As this chapter closes on the MFA, it’s helped me to generate and refine stories that I’m even more excited about. Looking forward to a lot of revising and submitting in 2025, with fingers crossed for more publications!