trouble styling links using WP as website

I’m developing a magazine’s website using WordPress as a CMS and creating a custom theme which started as WP Framework. The CSS is in the file screen.css, linked to from style.css. The HTML content is in the .hfeed window (the dialog box usually used to write posts).

When I add style specifications to the CSS file such as:
a: link{color:#f4c25d;}
it doesn’t take effect. I’ve tried putting the text of the link in a <p> tag and changing the CSS accordingly:
p: link{color:#f4c25d;}

When neither worked I tried moving them to the bottom of the CSS file to move them up in the hierarchy which also didn’t work.

I’m stumped on how to style these links given how I have the site set up. Any suggestions? Thank you in advance for any ideas!