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:
National Book Award–winning author Ta-Nehisi Coates has recruited fiction and nonfiction writer Roxane Gay and poet Yona Harvey to cowrite the Marvel comic series Black Panther: World of Wakanda. A companion to Coates’s Black Panther series, World of Wakanda will debut in November and follow the adventures of two African warriors, who are both queer women. (New York Times)
The slam poetry group Muslim Girls Making Change, comprised of four Muslim American teenagers, addresses the problem of Islamophobia in the United States and aims to educate Americans and dispel myths and fears about the Islam faith. (Huffington Post)
This fall, the art collective Artangel will present an exhibition and event series inside the prison in Reading, England, where Oscar Wilde served a sentence in the 1890s. “Inside—Artists and Writers in Reading Prison” will feature a reading of Wilde’s De Profundis, performed by author Colm Tóibín, writer and musician Patti Smith, and actor Ralph Fiennes, among others. (New York Times)
“When I was not worried about others and wrote the book just for myself, as I did for almost all of those two years, I experienced, for the first time, the most extraordinary joy in writing.” Viet Thanh Nguyen discusses the process of writing his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Sympathizer. (Guardian)
In an interview with Publishers Weekly, Colson Whitehead discusses his forthcoming novel, The Underground Railroad, which took fifteen years to complete. The book, Whitehead’s eighth, comes out in September from Doubleday.
Edith Wharton’s novels of the late nineteenth and twentieth century serve as iconic depictions of New York City’s gilded age, yet the landmarks and buildings from Wharton’s New York have all but vanished, “beyond a small red plaque at her childhood home.” (Independent)
Orange is the New Black’s Samira Wiley has joined the cast of the forthcoming television adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale. Wiley will star alongside Elizabeth Moss in the ten-episode series, which will premiere on Hulu next year. (Vanity Fair)
Fiction and nonfiction writer Geoff Dyer considers the lasting influence of On the Road writer Jack Kerouac, and why one particular image of him, taken in 1959, “captures not just a moment but the whole of the life; not just the man but the legend—and vice–versa.” (Spectator)
