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:
Last night, Nobel laureate Toni Morrison gave an hour-long interview for the BBC. The Pulitzer Prize–winner spoke about her childhood, her experiences at Howard University, the time she spent in publishing, and her latest novel, God Help the Child. (Western Morning News)
VIDA: Women in Literary Arts is funding a fellowship for poets to attend the Home School, a six-day writing conference that features workshops led by Timothy Donnelly, Dorothea Lasky, and Maggie Nelson. Home School 2016 will take place in Miami Beach, Florida, and VIDA will provide a full tuition waiver and honorarium for one fellow. Applications are open until August 15.
Following public complaints, Hachette Australia has ended a controversial promotional campaign for the fourth installment of Stieg Larsson’s best-selling Millennium series, The Girl in the Spider’s Web. As part of the campaign, the publisher announced a casting call for a woman who would be given a large, permanent back tattoo to promote the book, but the “tatvertising” campaign, well, backfired. (B&T)
Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro is featured on a new Canada Post stamp. The stamp was released on July 10, honoring Munro on her eighty-fourth birthday. (Quill & Quire)
The Supreme Court’s decision to legalize gay marriage in all fifty states made history last month. Seven LGBT authors discuss what the legalization of gay marriage means to them and the future of LGBT literature. (Feed Your Need to Read)
At the New York Times, David Orr revisits Robert Lowell’s “cooked versus raw” poetry debate, and how that binary distinction continues to echo in current discussions of poetry and poetics.
In the first installment of Electric Literature’s series The Writing Life Around the World, Guatemalan author Eduardo Halfon discusses the censorship and threats placed on writers in Guatemala. “How can a novelist or a poet say anything truthful about their own people, about the social inequality, about the intolerable levels of racism and poverty, if their very life hangs on the words of those novels or poems? They can’t.”
