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:
In an interview with the Poetry Foundation, MacArthur “Genius” grant recipient and National Book Award–winner Ta-Nehisi Coates talks about how his training as a poet influenced his life as a writer: “All the poetry I have goes other places. It’s still with me. When I think about black lives, or the Black Panther comic, I’m thinking in a poetic sense.”
Two unpublished poems by The Lord of the Rings author J. R. R. Tolkien have been discovered inside a 1936 copy of an annual journal from Our Lady’s School in Oxfordshire, England. The poems are believed to have been written while the author was a professor at Oxford University, one year before The Hobbit was published. (BBC News)
Starting on February 22, BBC Radio will air a five-part series of readings from an uncensored adaptation of Erica Jong’s 1973 novel Fear of Flying. The novel reading is part of BBC Radio’s celebration of feminist literature called Riot Girls, which also features readings from The Life and Loves of a She Devil by British novelist Fay Weldon, and other feminist radio plays. (International Business Times)
A man named Matt Steel has launched a Kickstarter campaign to publish a new edition of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden for “modern readers.” Steel plans to adapt the 1854 text to update archaisms and references to increase its accessibility. (Guardian)
New York Times magazine features a profile of acclaimed novelist Dana Spiotta, in advance of her forthcoming novel, Innocents and Others, which will be published in March. Of her work, Susan Burton writes, “Her books are simultaneously vast and local, exploring great American themes (self-invention, historical amnesia) within idiosyncratic worlds (phone phreaks, ’80s Los Angeles adolescence). She has been compared with Don DeLillo and Joan Didion, but her tone and mood are distinctly her own: She’s fascinated, not alienated.”
The New Yorker examines how publishing house New Directions—founded by James Laughlin in 1936—continues to stay afloat and publish great books in an ever-changing industry.
At A Public Space, fiction writer Sara Majka discusses her debut story collection, Cities I’ve Never Lived In; intimacy and autobiographical fiction; and the role travel plays in her work.
