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:
Sixty-five prominent writers and artists, including Zadie Smith, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Azar Nafisi, have penned an open letter to President Trump urging him to rescind his executive order that bans citizens from seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States. (New York Times)
PEN America has announced some of the winners of its 2017 Literary Awards, including poet Natalie Scenters-Zapico, fiction writer Helen Oyeyemi, and prose writer Aleksandar Hemon. Each year PEN America awards more than $300,000 to writers and translators for books published in the previous year.
Riverhead Books has announced that publishing veteran Cal Morgan will return to the literary world as its executive editor. Morgan, who worked at HarperCollins for sixteen years, took a break from editing in 2015. Morgan speaks with Literary Hub about why he took time off, the best books he read during that period, and why he chose to join Riverhead.
From Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style to Writing Without Bullshit by Josh Bernoff, Nat Segnit surveys writing manuals and argues that many fail to practice what they preach. (Harper’s Magazine)
Researchers at Bangor University have found that human brains can appreciate the musical qualities of a poem independent of its literary meaning. The study showed that participants’ brains immediately recognized more metrically regular lines of Welsh poetry even if participants could not later articulate which lines were more aesthetically pleasing. (Frontiers in Psychology)
Meanwhile, NPR considers the health benefits of poetry in a writing workshop for seniors in Culver City, California.
At the New Yorker, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner considers scholar Gary Taylor’s new approach to Shakespeare—Taylor’s new Oxford edition of Shakespeare credits fourteen other playwrights as co-authors of many of the Bard’s plays—and how culture’s lionization of Shakespeare might have muddled scholarship of his work.
“History is a narrative after all, whether the information presented or arguments made are in standardized textbooks or fictionalized accounts.” At the Atlantic, Anna Diamond ponders the benefits and challenges of teaching historical fiction in schools to better understand the present.
