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Every day the editors of Poets & Writers Magazine scan the headlines—publishing reports, literary dispatches, academic announcements, and more—for all the news that creative writers need to know.
Finalists for Canada’s 2024 Griffin Poetry Prize have been announced, including Jorie Graham for To 2040, Ishion Hutchinson for School of Instructions, Ann Lauterbach for Door, Ben Lerner for The Lights, Fred Moten for Perennial Fashion Presence Falling, and Mira Rosenthal for her translation of To the Letter by Tomasz Różycki. Read about recent changes to the Griffin Poetry Prize in Poets & Writers Magazine.
Publishers Weekly, Literary Hub, and KQED weigh in on the fallout from the closure of Small Press Distribution, announced yesterday.
As National Reading Month comes to a close, NPR offers some tips for how to read more books in 2024.
Small Press Distribution has announced that it will close its doors after fifty-five years in business. The nonprofit book distributor for independent presses across the U.S. cited “declining sales and the loss of grant support from almost every institution” as context for its closure.
The Los Angeles Review of Books writes about Toni Morrison’s rejection letters to writers during the Nobel laureate’s time as a senior editor at Random House. “Morrison’s rejections tend to be long, generous in their suggestions, and direct in their criticism.”
The finalists for the Lambda Literary Awards have been announced in twenty-six categories, representing “outstanding LGBTQ+ literature from 2023.”
PEN America’s staff union, PEN America United, says the free speech organization is attempting “to chill the free expression of its own workers—at a time when PEN America is facing mounting outrage from hundreds of prominent authors for its inadequate response on the war in Gaza,” according to a statement by the union. The accusation comes in response to language PEN America proposed during bargaining with the union this month that would discipline staff for engaging in “political activity that ‘impacts the ability of PEN America to engage in its mission.’” PEN America’s management disputes the charges, according to Publishers Weekly.
At Literary Hub managing editor Emily Temple weighs in on her favorite covers of books released this month, noting the abundance of bright colors.
Harvard University discovered a book in its Houghton Library that was bound with human skin, the BBC reports. Des Destinées de l’Ame, written by by Arsène Houssaye in the mid-1880s, “is a meditation on the soul and life after death.” Harvard has “announced it has removed the binding ‘due to the ethically fraught nature of the book’s origins and subsequent history’.”
For his story collection The Hive and the Honey, Paul Yoon was named this year’s winner of the Story Prize; the annual award for a book of U.S. fiction celebrates its twentieth anniversary this year.
The Washington Post offers a history lesson on the Maryland-born poet who is the namesake of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, which collapsed after it was struck by a cargo ship yesterday. Best known for penning “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Key wrote other verse and—like so many lionized U.S. historical figures—held disturbing views that have spurred many to question why his name should be commemorated.
The winners of the 2024 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards from the Cleveland Foundation have been announced: Ned Blackhawk in nonfiction for The Rediscovery of America, Teju Cole in fiction for Tremor, and Monica Youn in poetry for From From. Maxine Hong Kingston was awarded a lifetime achievement award.
Influential literary scholar Marjorie Perloff has died at age 92, reports the New York Times.
Publishing revenue ticked up modestly overall last year, though adult trade sales took a slight dip, reports Publishers Weekly. Digital audio sales, however, leapt upward in the adult segment by 16 percent.
Fashion brand Chanel recently hosted a “Literary Rendez-vous” in Paris with author Rachel Cusk, model Naomi Campbell, and Chanel ambassador Charlotte Casiraghi, reports RUSSH, an Australian fashion magazine. Chanel apparently has a “rich literary tradition”; its last Literary Rendez-vous featured author Jeanette Winterson, critic Erica Wagner, and Chanel ambassador and actress Kristen Stewart.
The Nation profiles author Viet Thanh Nguyen.
Publishers Weekly has named eight presses to its 2024 list of fast-growing independent publishers, including Mad Cave Studios in Miami, Florida; Microcosm Publishing in Portland, Oregon; and Forefront Books in Nashville.
For those who prefer boo-hoos to basketball, Electric Literature has launched March Sadness, a tournament of bleak books. Voting starts today on the literary website’s social media channels, where voters can weigh in on the biggest tearjerker: Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Justin Torres’s We the Animals, Hanya’s Yanagihara’s A Little Life, or some other tale of woe.
Philip Metres and Jessica Jacobs discuss their new poetry collections and the serendipity of their shared themes and book-cover imagery on Ideastream, a public broadcaster in Cleveland. Metres’s Fugitive/Refuge, forthcoming in April from Copper Canyon Press, and Jacobs’s Unalone, published by Four Way Books this month, have the same cover photograph and meditate on family history and faith.
Stephen King’s Carrie was first published a half century ago this year. In the New York Times Margaret Atwood reflects on the lure and importance of this horror classic.
In the Millions, Lauren Alwan offers praise for authors who take their sweet time: “I’m interested in how, in a world that values speed, the slow writer learns to tolerate the uncertainty that comes with the long project.”
PEN America has received a reply to its open letter published this week responding to authors who dropped out of this year’s PEN World Voices Festival in protest of the organization’s response to the war in Gaza, Literary Hub reports. The protesting authors are calling for “a thorough review and examination of the conduct and performance of PEN America with regard to the tragic consequences of the Israeli occupation that is currently playing out and has played out in Israel and Palestine for several decades.”
The winners of the National Book Critics Circle Awards have been announced, including Safiya Sinclair in autobiography for How to Say Babylon, Lorrie Moore in fiction for I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home, and Kim Hyesoon, translated by Don Mee Choi, in poetry for Phantom Pain Wings.
PEN America has issued a letter responding to critics of the free-speech organization’s stance on the war in Gaza, calling for a cease-fire in the war, expanding support for Palestinian writers, and enacting other measures while defending its role in holding space for “sharply divergent views on questions of deep consequence. For some, referencing nuance is moral betrayal. For others, failure to do so is unconscionable. As an organization open to all writers, we see no alternative but to remain home to this diversity of opinions and perspectives, even if, for some, that very openness becomes reason to exit.”
Publicist Lena Little has launched her own firm, Lena K Little Public Relations, reports Publishers Weekly. Little has worked with Knopf, Pantheon, and Little, Brown and authors including Leslie Jamison, Chigozie Obioma, and Orhan Pamuk, among others.
The Washington Post profiles recent Cave Canem Prize winner Ajibola Tolase, whose debut poetry collection, 2,000 Blacks, will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press this fall.
The Perelandra Bookshop in Fort Collins, Colorado, has launched a reader-in-residence program, reports the Colorado Sun. “The reader gets a small stipend for their three-month stint—$50 per month for books, and another $50 per month for coffee. They also have access to Perelandra’s wholesale book catalog. The overt goal of the residency is to foster a space for people to experience literature more thoughtfully.”
Dazed magazine interviews Patrick McGraw, the editor of Heavy Traffic, “a new space for instinctual, unbounded writing,” which has published experimental fiction by Sean Thor Conroe, Chris Kraus, and other authors alongside culture makers who are not known for their writing.
The Atlantic suggests some books that can help digitally overloaded readers learn to the appreciate the physical world.
Lambda Literary has called for a cease-fire in Israel’s war in Gaza. The organization joins a growing chorus of writers and literary institutions—including PEN America and PEN International, Writers Against the War on Gaza, Kundiman, a group of translators, a community of children’s book authors and illustrators, among others—that have condemned the conflict that has killed more than thirty thousand Palestinians after Hamas’s attack on October 7, which killed around twelve hundred people in Israel.
The New York City Department of Education has launched an investigation after hundreds of books were found in the trash at a public school in Staten Island, New York, with notes indicating that they were dumped because they deal with race, immigration, and queerness, reports ABC News. Reports of the trashed books follow close on the heels of the American Library Association’s announcement of another record year for efforts to ban books.
The National Book Foundation has announced its annual 5 Under 35 list, which honors young fiction writers: Antonia Angress, author of Sirens & Muses (Ballantine); Maya Binyam, author of Hangman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Zain Khalid, author of Brother Alive (Grove Atlantic); Tyriek White, author of We Are a Haunting (Astra Publishing House); and Jenny Tinghui Zhang, author of Four Treasures of the Sky (Flatiron).
The New Yorker contemplates the uncanniness of artificial intelligence, particularly the large language models that power chatbots like ChatGPT: “A large language model generates ideas, words, and contexts never before known. It is also—when it takes on the form of a chatbot—a digital metamorph, a character-based shape-shifter, fluid in identity, persona, and design.”
Upstart book publisher Authors Equity, which reportedly will rely on a staff of freelancers, continues to draw criticism. In the Baffler, Dan Sinykin, author of Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature, scrutinizes the leaders behind the company and their “strikingly neoliberal” vision.
Publishers Weekly shares a conversation with Lauren Groff at Winter Institute, the American Booksellers Association’s annual conference, which Groff attended in February to prepare for the opening of the Lynx, an independent bookstore she and her husband, Clay Kallman, will open in Gainesville, Florida, next month. “Groff hopes that, with an inventory that emphasizes books by BIPOC and LGBTQ+ authors that deal with such issues as race, gender identity, and sexuality, the Lynx ‘will reverberate outwards, and be a beacon of hope’” at a time when efforts to ban or limit access to books has reached a fever pitch nationwide, particularly in Florida.
Workers at a Barnes & Noble on the Upper West Side of New York City have voted to unionize, reports Publishers Weekly. The Upper West Side store is the sixth Barnes & Noble nationwide to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.
The American Booksellers Association (ABA) and Small Business Rising, a group that represents independent businesses, have dubbed March 20 “SBA: Dump Amazon! Day” The occasion is meant to pressure the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) to dump Amazon as a sponsor of the administration’s National Small Business Week, which will be held April 28–May 4. “Amazon’s co-sponsorship is little more than a disingenuous PR stunt, allowing it to whitewash its anticompetitive behavior and all the harm it is doing to small business,” says a statement by the ABA.
The New York Times sends a dispatch from the London Book Fair: “For those who weren’t there to close deals, the fair offered the opportunity to map out the minutely graded power structure of the publishing industry.”
Kristen Arnett, Naomi Klein, Hisham Matar, Lorrie Moore, Kayla Upadhyaya, and other writers will not participate in this year’s PEN World Voices Festival due to PEN America’s stance on the crisis in Gaza. In an open letter the authors write: “Palestine’s poets, scholars, novelists and journalists and essayists have risked everything, including their lives and the lives of their families, to share their words with the world. Yet PEN America appears unwilling to stand with them firmly against the powers that have oppressed and dispossessed them for the last 75 years."
Palestinian American author Susan Abulhawa spoke with Democracy Now! about her recent visit to Gaza, during which she brought food and other needed materials and managed to conduct a writing workshop. “You know, we talk so much about the physical needs, because it’s immense—you know, water, food, shelter. But there’s the psychological, the intellectual needs,” says Abulhawa, who is the executive director of Palestine Writes, “the only North American literature festival dedicated to celebrating and promoting cultural productions of Palestinian writers and artists.”
On Literary Hub Maris Kreizman offers a critique of a new publishing company called Authors Equity, which will reportedly rely on a staff of freelancers: “Rather than offering book workers the stability and benefits of full-time employment, Authors Equity will rely on the gig economy to get the job done. ... [T]hese kinds of cost-cutting measures also very rarely make the finished output better,” writes Kreizman.
The American Library Association has released data on book-banning efforts in 2023, reporting that the number of unique titles challenged in public and school libraries increased 65 percent since 2022. That sets a new record: Last year’s “efforts to censor 4,240 unique book titles…tops the previous high from 2022, when 2,571 unique titles were targeted for censorship.” Read about how librarians and others have been resisting book banning in the current issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
The winners of the inaugural Libby Book Awards have been announced; among them are James McBride’s The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store for Best Adult Fiction and Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions for You for Best Audiobook. The awards in seventeen categories are judged by seventeen hundred librarians worldwide.
Black Lawrence Press of New York will publish the winners of the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry from Fresno State University in California, which offers $2,000 and publication of a poetry collection; Black Lawrence’s first title in the series will be S Is For by William Archila, chosen by Douglas Kearney for the 2023 award. Winners of the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry were previously published by Anhinga Press of Florida.
In the Atlantic author Phil Klay lambastes Guernica for retracting an essay it published by a Jewish woman living in Israel that many interpreted as insensitive to the ongoing crisis in Gaza, which reportedly has killed more than thirty thousand Palestinians, including more than thirteen thousand children. In January the International Court of Justice ruled that it was “plausible” that Israel’s retaliatory war against Gaza after Hamas’s October 7 attack, which killed twelve hundred Israelis, was tantamount to genocide.
More than a dozen staff members of Guernica have resigned after the literary magazine published an essay by a Jewish writer living in Israel, with one editor calling it a “genocide apologia,” reports the Los Angeles Times. Guernica has since retracted the essay and reportedly removed it from its website. A Jewish writer who has published in the journal said the essay merely “presents an Israeli as human.” Guernica’s editors have also “received complaints that their magazine lacked a complexity of voices.”
The longlist of thirteen nominees for this year’s International Booker Prize—which awards novels and story collections translated into English and published in the U.K. and/or Ireland—have been announced. Check out what the prize judges, including U.S. writers Natalie Diaz and Aaron Robertson, have to say about their selections here.
Chinese fiction writer Mo Yan, who won the Nobel Prize in 2012, is being sued by a blogger in China who claims Yan’s books “smeared the ruling Communist Party’s reputation,” violating a 2018 law meant to combat “historical nihilism” in the country, writes the Associated Press.
Contemporary Russian literature is in the midst of a renaissance, according to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, with many authors—particularly women—under the age of thirty-five publishing diverse works in response to post-Soviet politics.
Libraries are struggling to keep up with the demand for e-books, which for libraries are much more expensive than hard copies of books, reports the Associated Press.
Meg Day is this year’s poet-in-residence at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the third poet to hold the title. Read more about the residency, a museum collaboration with the Academy of American Poets, in Poets & Writers Magazine.
Publishers Weekly interviews Anjali Singh, who has launched her own agency, Anjali Singh Literary. Most recently an agent with Ayesha Pande Literary, Singh has also served as the editorial director of Other Press and as an editor with Simon & Schuster, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Vintage Books.
The fashion industry has taken a literary turn recently, with books inspiring clothing collections, interior design, and more. Author Simon Chilvers’ discusses the trend on a podcast from the Financial Times.
A NASA spacecraft, which in October is set to travel to Jupiter’s moon Europa, will carry an engraving of a handwritten poem by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón called “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa.”
The finalists for the 2024 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction were announced this week: Jamel Brinkley for Witness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Henry Hoke for Open Throat (MCD), Claire Jimenez for What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Alice McDermott for Absolution (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and Colin Winnette for Users (Soft Skull).
Fitzcarraldo Editions, an independent U.K. press specializing in fiction and longform essays, will begin publishing poetry collections, with Diane Seuss as one of its inaugural poets, reports the Bookseller.
An exhibition of literary posters—which advertised magazines, journals, books, and other literature near the turn of the twentieth century—opened this week at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Fine Books & Collections magazine writes about this “vibrant genre at the vanguard of modern commercial art and graphic design.”
José Luis Montero will serve as Hugo House’s acting executive director while the Seattle literary center searches for a permanent leader following the departure of director Diana Delgado, effective April 1. Montero is on Hugo House’s board of directors and “has served in a variety of roles in the Seattle literary community,” says a statement sent by e-mail yesterday from Hugo House board president Gary Luke.
AL.com takes readers “inside the blistering battle over Alabama libraries,” at least nine of which have been involved in heated book-banning controversies. “A survey by the state library service found that residents challenged more than 100 books,” and librarians have been moving young adult books to the adult section, which by some measures counts as censorship; “[a]t least one library removed an LGBTQ book in the adult section from its shelves altogether.”
This year’s Oscar-nominated films feature not only fictional characters but made-up books those characters wrote, read, or kept on a shelf. The Washington Post contemplates which of those imaginary volumes deserves an Oscar: Boner, Light and Magic in the Ancient World, or another of several invented titles.
Drag star RuPaul opened an online bookstore this week called Allstora, which promises to increase profits for authors while offering an inclusive space in opposition to book-banning efforts that have targeted queer writers and writers of color. But the store sparked controversy due to its sale of titles by conservative authors and even editions of Mein Kampf, writes Vulture.
The Associated Press reports on Ada Limón’s signature project as U.S. poet laureate. Called You Are Here, the project includes an anthology of place-based poetry and a tour of seven national parks. Check out Poets & Writers Magazine’s Anthologist column to read about the anthology, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World.
Gabriel García Márquez told one of his sons that he wanted the last novel he worked on before his death, in 2014, “to be destroyed.” But that book, Until August, will be published this month, raising “questions about how literary estates and publishers should navigate posthumous releases that contradict a writer’s directives,” writes the New York Times.
Sunset interviews Annabelle Chang, a high school senior who opened the first young adult bookstore in the United States, called Annabelle’s Book Club LA. “It’s really important to read what you’re excited about, what you’re interested in, and what makes you want to stay up until two in the morning finishing it,” says Chang.
There are more than five hundred Silent Book Club chapters in fifty countries, and Philadelphia is home to one of them, reports the Philadelphia Inquirer. The Philly chapter meets monthly at a café, where people gather to read silently for sixty minutes that are akin to an “introvert happy hour.”
A startup publisher called Authors Equity, which includes backers formerly with Big Five publishers, will do away with book advances and offer authors “the lion’s share” of profits made from their books, reports the New York Times.
Generative AI, a category which includes the language-producing ChatGPT, is top of mind for business leaders, who are mostly “bullish” about the technology and expect to double their use of it this year, reports Publishers Weekly.
Diversity in publishing has been steadily increasing, according to Lee & Low Books’ Diversity Baseline Survey: Last year, 72.5 percent of publishing, review journal, and literary agency staff identified as White/Caucasian, down from 76 percent in 2019 and 79 percent in 2015, according to the survey.
The slightly different color of a rereleased cult-favorite ink by a German pen manufacturer has spurred a “drama in the fountain pen community,” reports the New York Times.
