Jump to navigation Skip to content
Articles from Poet & Writers Magazine include material from the print edition plus exclusive online-only material.
In his sixth book, a sonnet sequence published by Penguin in June, Terrance Hayes cuts deep, to the marrow of the American moment, in a form with a razor’s edge: love poems for the forces trying to kill you.
Florida isn’t just the title of Lauren Groff’s new story collection, published in June by Riverhead Books; it’s also a bad joke, a good home, a source of inspiration, a set of contradictions, and, perhaps, ultimately a state of mind.
Poet, publisher, editor, and activist Carmen Giménez Smith, whose fifth book, Cruel Futures, is out from City Lights, has some advice for other hardworking poets: We make art to reach readers, not to win a race.
Poetry Out Loud offers high school students a new way of seeing the world.
Novelists Caroline Leavitt and Jonathan Evison discuss the books that just didn’t work.
Five writers over the age of fifty whose debut books were released this year: Jimin Han, Laura Hulthen Thomas, Karen E. Osborne, Tina Carlson, and Peg Alford Pursell. Excerpts of their books are available in 5 Over 50 Reads 2017.
With a new book of nonfiction, Bunk, a new job as director of a leading research center on black culture, and a new role as poetry editor of the New Yorker, Kevin Young is fully engaged in a personal program of moving multitudes.
Salman Rushdie’s new novel, The Golden House, marks a triumphant return to realism for the titan of letters whose insights on everything from novel-writing and magical realism to identity and social media are as fascinating as the worlds he creates in his books.
Two of the most dynamic poets writing today, both with new collections out, explore issues of poetry and craft, aesthetics and language, luxury and yearning, drag and systematic repression.
Readers have anticipated a new novel from the author of The God of Small Things for two full decades. Now, with the release of Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, the wait is over.
This year’s debut fiction roundup features emerging writers Zinzi Clemmons, Hala Alyan, Jess Arndt, Lisa Ko, and Diksha Basu.
Already established as a master of the short story, George Saunders turns to the long form in his debut novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, an imaginative tour de force in which nearly all the characters are dead.
A roundup of new and emerging writers over the age of fifty whose debut books were published during the past year, featuring Desiree Cooper, Sawnie Morris, Paul Vidich, Paula Whyman, and Paul Hertneky.
Upon the release of Another Brooklyn, her first novel for adults in twenty years, award-winning author Jacqueline Woodson discusses New York City’s literary legacy, the strength in being a person of color, putting humanity on the page, living in the age of Beyoncé, and happiness
Fifty American poets and writers offer messages to the next commander in chief about what’s most important to them, and what they hope to see in the next four years.
As part of our sixteenth annual First Fiction roundup, in which five debut authors—Yaa Gyasi, Masande Ntshanga, Rumaan Alam, Maryse Meijer, and Imbolo Mbue—discuss their first books, we picked nine more notable debuts that fans of fiction should consider reading this summer.
Annie Dillard has applied an endless curiosity and formidable intellect to elevate a searching and searing style of prose that has served as an example for generations of writers. A new collection, The Abundance, celebrates her masterful essays.
Michael Wiegers, the editor in chief of Copper Canyon Press, talks about how he decides which books to publish (from the two thousand manuscripts the press receives each year) and what it’s like to edit the likes of Pablo Neruda, W. S. Merwin, and C. D. Wright.
Dawn Davis—vice president and publisher of 37 INK, an imprint of Simon & Schuster’s Atria Publishing Group—talks about editing Edward P. Jones, the lack of diversity in publishing, and what some of the most successful authors have in common.
Her books, for readers of all ages, have been published in thirty-two languages and sold more than eighty-five million copies worldwide, but Judy Blume, whose new novel, In the Unlikely Event, was published by Knopf in June, has always taken a simple approach to her work: “I do what I have to do to tell the story.”
Jennifer Joel, whose clients include Chris Cleave, Joe McGinniss Jr., Evan Osnos, and Shonda Rhimes, talks about the difference between selling fiction and nonfiction, what inspires her to go the extra mile for her authors, and what writers should really want out of publishing.
In Ordinary Light, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Tracy K. Smith embraces a fuller sense of herself as a writer while cementing the connection between her children and her ancestors using the best glue she knows: words.
Louise Glück says a poet must be surprised by what the mind is capable of unveiling, which may explain why her twelfth book of poems, Faithful and Virtuous Night, published in September by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, feels so startlingly alive with the wonder of discovery.
Donald Hall may not be producing any more new poems, but the eighty-six-year-old author of more than fifty books is still revising; still polishing his prose, including the pieces in his new book, Essays After Eighty; and still reminiscing about a golden age of American poetry.
