Gabriel García Márquez Graces Colombia’s New Banknote, Roald Dahl’s Poetry, and More

by
Staff
9.7.16

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:

Late Nobel Prize–winning novelist Gabriel García Márquez is featured on Colombia’s new 50,000-peso bill. (Electric Literature)

Oxford Dictionaries has shut down its #OneWordMap site—a recently launched online initiative to find the most disliked word in the English language—due to an influx of offensive entries. (Guardian)

“Mayer’s wide sweep, unsentimental and uneven, helps explain both her contemporary appeal and, perhaps, her relative obscurity.” Daniel Wenger profiles poet Bernadette Mayer. (New Yorker)

Lisa Lucas, director of the National Book Foundation, discusses her goals for the organization and how to reframe the conversations surrounding literature to get more people excited about books. (New York Times Magazine)

A letter from a dying mother to her young daughter was recently discovered in a secondhand bookstore in Bishop Auckland, England; the letter has been returned to the daughter after being lost for fifteen years. (Guardian)

The Academy of American Poets announced the winners of its 2016 prizes, which honor poets at various stages in their careers. Sharon Olds took home the $100,000 Wallace Stevens Award for lifetime achievement. Other notable winners include Lynn Emanuel, Natasha Trethewey, and Mary Hickman. For more information, check out the Grants & Awards Blog.

At the Millions, novelist Dana Spiotta talks with Michael Helm about his fourth novel, After James, which “takes on specific technologies of science and art: drugs, language, genetic science, cyberspace, [and] artistic reproduction. These both extend and erode the self in ways peculiar to the new century.”

To celebrate Roald Dahl’s centenary this month, Adrienne Raphel writes for the Poetry Foundation about Dahl’s lesser-known poetic endeavors, as well as the poetry embedded in his novels and stories.