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:
Acting librarian of congress David Mao has appointed Juan Felipe Herrera to serve a second term as the poet laureate of the United States. The author of more than a dozen collections of poetry, Herrera will begin his second term on September 1. Mao said of Herrera’s appointment, “We look forward to seeing what Herrera will accomplish in his second term, and we know he will continue to inspire and educate with his warmth, enthusiasm, and creative genius.”
“Was her poetry just rhyming badinage dressed up as trenchant, plaintive ruminations on love, loss, and death? Her subjects are serious, but her cleverness undercuts them: there’s almost always a last line, a sardonic zinger, to signal that even if she does care, the more fool she.” At the New York Review of Books, Robert Gottlieb delves into the life and writing of the “brilliant, troubled” Dorothy Parker. “Even her most famous couplet—‘Men seldom make passes / At girls who wear glasses’—bandages a wound, although plenty of men made passes.”
For the tech-savvy writer on the go, here are some recommended writing apps that will help you to compose the next great American novel on public transit, courtesy of the New York Times.
“There would be no other woman in the publishing industry with the status of Blanche Knopf—either in the 1920s, when she signed Langston Hughes and Willa Cather, or in the 1950s, when she celebrated Albert Camus’s Nobel Prize and oversaw the translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. And despite it all, although her husband swore he’d put her name on the masthead, he never did.” Joanna Scutts reviews a new biography of Blanche Knopf, wife of legendary publisher Alfred A. Knopf. (New Republic)
The controversial former NAACP leader Rachel Dolezal—who self-identifies as black despite having white parents—is writing a book about racial identity, which will be published next March. (Yahoo! News)
In an interview at the Los Angeles Review of Books, fiction writer Jung Yun discusses her path to writing, her immigration from South Korea and her childhood in North Dakota, and her debut novel, Shelter, published last month by St. Martin’s Press.
At Catapult, nonfiction writer Jaime Green considers what positive discoveries can be made from reading one’s work aloud for an audience.
