Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today's stories:
Poet and critic Claudia Rankine delivered a keynote speech on “what keeps us uncomfortable in each other’s presence” to twenty-five hundred attendees at the annual Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference in Los Angeles last Thursday. Rankine spoke about discrimination towards writers of color in MFA programs, as well as how to account for those outside of one’s worldview. (Vulture, Publishers Weekly)
In more AWP news, Publishers Weekly sums up this year’s conference, which, among the usual spread of panels, events, and a sprawling bookfair, included the New York Times’s cardboard goggles made by Google and a (successful) marriage proposal at a BOA Editions reading.
“I learned to trust in the experience of writing, the larger, long-term process. That dyad of trust and process just keeps appearing in the world, you know? Whether a person comes to them through Eastern ideas of selflessness to the larger good, through a basketball coach screaming the main thing has to be the main thing, through the example of your parents showing up to work every day for forty years to unlock their store and get to work, through the twelve steps of a recovery program, or the simple belief in your feelings for another person, all sorts of different roads lead to trust and to process.” Charles Bock talks about the process of writing his second novel, Alice & Oliver. (Millions)
The New York Times goes inside poet Kevin Young’s home office in Atlanta, where he shares everything from his salt-and-pepper shakers to an animal skull he found to photographs of his family.
PEN America will award the PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Award to imprisoned Egyptian novelist and journalist Ahmed Naji in recognition of “his struggle in the face of adversity for the right to freedom of expression.” Naji, who has written three books and is a journalist at the literary magazine Akhbar al-Adab, was sentenced to two years in prison in February after being convicted of “violating public modesty” through references to sex and drugs in his novel The Guide for Using Life.
Nora Krug profiles famed children’s author Beverly Cleary, who turns one hundred next week. Cleary, who published her first book in 1950, talks about her beloved children’s character Ramona Quimby, how childhood has changed in the past century, and how she started reading. (Washington Post)
Hachette has finalized its acquisition of the Perseus Book Group’s publishing business. Perseus executive Susan Weinberg has been named the publisher of the new division under Hachette. (GalleyCat)
Robert M. Sapolsky rounds up recent scientific research on how the brain processes metaphors. (Wall Street Journal)
