Article Archive

Articles from Poet & Writers Magazine include material from the print edition plus exclusive online-only material.

Way, Way Too Much Information

by
Frank Bures
5.1.08

Today, it seems that we have access to an unlimited amount of information all the time, and for those of us who want to be alone with our thoughts, that information is getting harder and harder to avoid. More and more of us suffer from a condition sometimes called "digital information overload," or "infomania."

Obama’s “Bitter” and the Creative Nonfiction Writer: Postcard From the Campaign Trail

by
Kelly Nuxoll
4.17.08

The origin and form of Mayhill Fowler’s Huffington Post report on Barack Obama’s use of the word “bitter” suggest her work is neither blogging nor journalism, but creative nonfiction. That its effect was out of proportion with its intention begs the question: What can the creative nonfiction writer expect in the Information Age?

The Rising Fortunes of the Chinese Expat Scene

by
Stephen Morison Jr.
4.16.08
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Beijing, despite its cheap food and beer—two dollars worth of Chinese yuan will buy you a nice Chinese meal or a twelve-pack of Tsingtao beer—has yet to become the Paris of the 21st century, but an expat fiction scene is beginning to emerge.

Raw Inspiration: Postcard From Shanghai

by
Kristin Bair O’Keeffe
4.8.08

The first time my then-fiancée mentioned Shanghai, China, and our future in the same sentence, we were canoodling in our favorite pizza place in Massachusetts. I, wildly in love, responded to the possibility with nothing more than a slight pause. “Move to China?” I asked. “Sure, why not!”

An Interview With Writer and Editor Ander Monson

by
Meehan Crist
3.31.08

Ander Monson’s fourth book, the poetry collection Our Aperture, was published in January by New Michigan Press. It’s a short thirty pages, but it further extends the reach of the author’s genre-bending work. Poets & Writers Magazine recently asked Monson about his predilection for playing with genre.

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An Interview With Poet and Fiction Writer Grace Paley

by
Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towler
3.17.08
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Celebrated short story writer and poet Grace Paley died of cancer last August at the age of eighty-four. A lifelong activist, pacifist, and an early figure in the women’s rights movement in the 1960s, Paley was one of those writers who managed to combine a public life of frequent readings and appearances in support of a range of causes with work lauded for its artistic integrity. We interviewed Paley a little more than a year before her death at her home in Thetford.

An Interview With Poet Philip Levine

by
Sally Dawidoff
3.10.08
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Throughout his long career, Philip Levine has established a reputation for poems honoring the working class, beginning with the people he encountered as a young man laboring in the factories of Detroit. Though he has taught in writing programs nationwide since the 1950s, his poetry has maintained a stronger identification with the autoworker than the academic. Poets & Writers Magazine asked Levine, who turned eighty in January, how his writing is going these days.

The Grim Reader

by
Kevin Nance
3.1.08
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The National Endowment for the Arts releases To Read or Not to Read—a follow-up to the nonprofit's 2004 report, Reading at Risk—which further expounds on America's declining reading habits.

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The Written Image: Jellyfish

A look at Jellyfish, winner of best debut feature at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival and written and directed by Etgar Keret, an Israeli fiction writer, whose most recent collection of stories, The Girl on the Fridge, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Literary MagNet

by
Kevin Larimer
2.11.08

Literary MagNet chronicles the start-ups and closures, successes and failures, anniversaries and accolades, changes of editorship and special issues—in short, the news and trends—of literary magazines in America. This issue's MagNet features Pindeldyboz, Narrative, and Bellevue Literary Review.

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