What Comes Next: Creative Responses to Menopause

Readers will include: Moira Egan, Joan Larkin, Lynn Levin, Meredith Bergman, Ann Michael, April Lindner, Annie Finch, Rohini Reena Bannerjee, Cas Hruska, Annika Speer, Dahlia Aguilar, Mary Beth Danielson, Sam Szanto, Christina Grant, and Dawn Rhodes-Shaw. Check back here as we add other readers to the list!

Zoom link for October 18, 2026, 1-2:30 pm EST

https://sju.zoom.us/j/81462215702?pwd=6fMt30e4DGpAssbJ7L0tyARr6H6Szn.1

Meeting ID: 814 6221 5702
Passcode: 891309

We are currently seeking a publisher for What Comes Next: Creative Responses to Menopause:. Please contact us at amandahartmiller@gmail.com if you have publishing leads for us.

More about the anthology:

Menopause is having a moment!

Millennial and Gen X audiences, in particular, are driving an unprecedented demand for honest, nuanced language about midlife bodies and identities. Contemporary menopause content challenges silence, stigma, and medical gatekeeping around women’s health. Our multi-genre collection, currently titled What Comes Next: Creative Responses to Menopause, meets this moment and is directed at readers seeking emotional resonance and social critique of menopause. 

The collection brings together fiction, essays, poetry, hybrid works, visual art, and creative nonfiction to present menopause as a tapestry of identity, grief, humor, sexuality, rage, relief, and transformation. Its tone ranges from intimate to irreverent, personal to political. The anthology reflects the multiple experiences of menopausal people to disrupt the dominant narrative that menopause is a period of decline in which women’s vitality fades. In addition to artist bios, we have also included artist statements that will offer context and nuance for the works presented here.

Organized into five sections entitled, “Bodily Changes,” “Dread and Desire,” “Taking Care,” “Resisting Expectations,” and “The Wild Crone,” What Comes Next presents writing and art from fifty? writers and artists from a variety of intersectional identities, including lesbian and trans* writers, who are often missing from the current menopause conversation. The collection includes established and emerging writers like poets like Denise Duhamel, Joan Larkin, April Lindner, and A.E. Stallings. Many of the established authors have had multiple full-length works published in a variety of presses, and they are Pushcart and Best of the Net nominated. The six editors themselves have been published in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Blarb: The Blog of the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Intima, Exquisite Corpse: A Journal of Books and Ideas, PANK, and Literary Mama, and bring years of experience as readers, writers, and editors to their take on the collection. Three of the editors–Ann, Bryna, and Cristina–have recently co-authored Living Menopause: Rhetorics, Tensions, and Futures, a scholarly book for academic audience, out  in October 2026 from Bloomsbury Academic.

What Comes Next is both accessible and artistically rigorous. While there are many self-help books on menopause in the market place, at the present moment we have found a gap in creative writing anthologies on menopause. The Big M: 13 Writers Take Back the Story of Menopause (Grand Central Publishing, 2026) is fabulous, but it includes exclusively nonfiction essays by established writers. What Comes Next exceeds its foremother anthologies Writing Menopause (Inanna Poetry and Fiction Series, 2017) and Menopause: The Anthology (Arachne Press, 2023) in the variety of authors and genres represented. The anthology delivers an authentic and meaningful experience from writers who themselves have and are navigating perimenopause and menopause in real time. In addition, What Comes Next will be an appropriate text for women’s studies, English classes, and even classes on public health that address menopause.