Creative Nonfiction Consultations with Marcela Sulak

Marcela Sulak’s fifth title with Black Lawrence Press, a novella-in-verse, The Fault, was published in 2024. Her previous four titles include three poetry collections, City of Skypapers, a 2021 finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, Decency, and Immigrant, as well as her lyric memoir, Mouth Full of Seeds. She’s co-edited with Jacqueline Kolosov the 2015 Rose Metal Press title Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres. Her essays have appeared in The Boston Review, The Iowa Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Asymptote, and Gulf Coast online, among others. Marcela Sulak directs the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University. She also edits The Ilanot Review.

Marcela is accepting everything from flash-length essays to full-length manuscripts. The fees and parameters for each of these categories are as follows:

Flash Essays, up to 2 pages in length, $25
Essays, up to 20 pages in length, $55
Chapbooks, up to 40 pages in length, $275
Manuscripts, up to 180 pages in length, $550
Long Manuscripts, up to 300 pages in length, $795

Marcela will provide detailed comments on your manuscript as well as a cover letter. After receiving these files, participants who submit chapbooks and full-length manuscripts may also book phone/video conferences with Marcela at no additional charge.

All manuscripts should be double spaced and formatted in 12-point font.The deadline to submit work for this consultation program is February 28. Marcela will complete her work and respond to all participants by March 31.

Creative Nonfiction Consultations with Marcela Sulak

Click Here to Submit Deadline: February 28 How to submit ›

Statement of Purpose

All literary genres–especially nonfiction genres–contain within them particular expectations with regard to truth telling and the position of the writer/speaker/reader in the world of the text, and in the world at large. My interest and education in creative nonfiction comes from documentary poetics and witness, as well my work in hybridity. While co-editing and creating the Rose Metal Press title, Family Resemblance. An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres, I fell in love with braided essay, lyrical memoir, hermit crab essay, and flash and micro forms for their ability to create containers for content that had not yet been dreamed of, for truths that had not yet been explored but they had not yet been heard, seen, or noticed.

Engaging in more standard forms of literary nonfiction, biography, and memoir, I am interested in turning facts into truths; in creating engaging, complex characters, unforgettable scenes. From my poetry training, I bring a fervent devotion to syntax and word choice, fresh imagery, and precision.

As a reader, I love what feels urgent, but allows itself the time it needs to unfold its big heart, like Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club. I love the combination of the researched and the personal we see in Shelley Puhak’s “Detained. A Genealogy of Whores and Wolves,” or Valeria Luiselli, Eula Biss. I especially love a sense of self irony, Noam Drorr’s Love Drones. Some of my loves interrogate what we accept as truth–Joy Harjo’s Crazy Brave or, Claudia Rankine’s work, Laylie Long Soldier’s “38.” Finally, epistolary essays by James Baldwin, Vaclav Havel, which are written from prison, or to keep someone from prison, live inside me as fine and powerful reminders of the sacredness of the human individual and the responsibility we have for ourselves and for one another.

No matter what the topic, a good piece of writing makes use of its sub-genre and its truth-expectations, uses language effectively, and is aware of the individual within the system of meaning-making that is our world.

Marcela Sulak

Marcela Sulak's fifth title with Black Lawrence Press, a novella-in-verse, The Fault, was published in 2024. Her previous four titles include three poetry collections, City of Skypapers, a 2021 finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, Decency, and Immigrant, as well as her lyric memoir, Mouth Full of Seeds. She’s co-edited with Jacqueline Kolosov the 2015 Rose Metal Press title Family Resemblance. An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres. Sulak, who translates from the Hebrew, Czech, and French, is a 2019 NEA Translation Fellow, and her fourth book-length translation of poetry: Twenty Girls to Envy Me: Selected Poems of Orit Gidali, was nominated for the 2017 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation (University of Texas Press). Her essays have appeared in The Boston Review, The Iowa Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Asymptote, and Gulf Coast online, among others. Marcela Sulak directs the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University. She also edits The Ilanot Review.

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Works By Marcela Sulak

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