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Articles from Poet & Writers Magazine include material from the print edition plus exclusive online-only material.
This past weekend, as the sidewalks and the streets of midtown Manhattan once again began to fill with urban dwellers lingering in the first warmth of spring, some of New York City’s writers and publishers found pause indoors, creating, investigating, and celebrating the little sibling of the poetry collection: the chapbook.
One of my favorite passages in literature is from Italo Calvino’s if on a winter’s night a traveler—the one in which the narrator stands in the bookstore listing all the different kinds of books every true reader owns but will never read. Somehow it’s always captured, exactly, the disconnect between the truth and fiction of my own reading life.
Spread the word about debut poets and their work with this Pass-Along Poems chapbook. Print, assemble, and bind several handcrafted, saddle-stitched editions. Add your recommendations for first-time poets on the back pages, and while you’re at it, paste in your own polished, unpublished work or that of others you admire.
On the second Saturday of this month, a renovated turn-of-the-century electrical parts factory in the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens was aglow with jovial literary energy, much of which was generated in response to the albatross of many a writer: student loan debt.
In preparation for our upcoming July/August issue, we want to hear from you: What books do you, as a writer who reads deeply year-round, turn to in the warm months ahead?
Earlier this month, Brian Turner, Buddy Wakefield, Ofelia Zepeda, and other poets gathered in the desert for the twenty-seventh annual Tucson Poetry Festival.
Boston-area poets and poetry fans came in from the cold last weekend to read, listen, and mingle at one of the city’s best-known literary events: the Boston National Poetry Month Festival.
On April 1 I had the joy of being in the audience at the New School in New York City for a reading by six poets of the Oulipo, or Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (“workshop of potential literature”), a writers group founded in France in 1960 by writer and mathematician Raymond Queneau and scientist François Le Lionnaisnown.
Nick Piombino has been associated with various schools of poetry, but he is, perhaps, most well known for being one of the theorists who initiated the investigation into what became Language poetry. He spoke recently about collaboration, collage, and his collection Contradicta: Aphorisms, forthcoming from Green Integer Press this month.
Novelist Tom Perrotta visited the University of New Hampshire in Durham as part of its Writers Series on an early March afternoon that was sunny enough for New Englanders to shed their wool caps and warm enough for the giant sand-filled snow banks that lined the roads to recede ever so slightly.
By presenting seventy-three poets, all of whom the editors believe constitute what Charles Bernstein famously called "official verse culture" as well as its unofficial, avant-garde counterpart, the new anthology American Hybrid strives to showcase the diversity of contemporary American poetry while also revealing the unusual affinities within it.
With so many good books being published every month, some literary titles worth exploring can get lost in the stacks. Page One offers the first lines of a dozen recently released books, including Noelle Kocot's Sunny Wednesday and Jane Vandenbergh's A Pocket History of Sex in the Twentieth Century as the starting point for a closer look at these new and noteworthy titles.
Small Press Points highlights the happenings of the small press players. This issue features Canarium Books, Tupelo Press, Chelsea Green, and Persea Books.
Literary MagNet chronicles the start-ups and closures, successes and failures, anniversaries and accolades, changes of editorship and special issues—in short, the news and trends—of literary magazines in America. This issue's MagNet features the Normal School, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, and Narrative.
April Ossmann, who recently stepped down as executive director of Alice James Books, the Farmington, Maine–based nonprofit cooperative poetry press founded in 1973, spoke about her time at Alice James from her home in Post Mills, a snowy hamlet in eastern Vermont.
Trying to capitalize on the popularity of graphic novels, Hill and Wang, an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, has begun publishing graphic nonfiction titles. Their latest release, The Beats: A Graphic History, covers all the major writers of the generation.
Four young editors, from big houses and small, take some time off to discuss what makes a good manuscript, what they’ve come to expect from their authors, and how much of their work needs to be done at night and on weekends.
Three new biographies tackle the private lives and literary legends of Donald Barthelme, John Cheever, and Flannery O'Connor.
My confusion came from a curious warning. Awash in a sea of writers and would-be writers in a drab-walled meeting room at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference a few years ago in Vancouver, B.C., I was listening to author Dinty W. Moore extol the virtues of creative nonfiction writing when suddenly he straightened his stout body and leaned across the podium. "Look out," he cautioned, his tone dire, "the journalists are coming!"
A sampling of budget itineraries for do-it-yourself retreats in Boston, Massachusetts; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Savannah, Georgia; and Taos, New Mexico.
Four days after a liberal blogger and writer was stabbed at a bookstore during a reading in Beijing, the writing community here still has more questions than answers. Xu Lai is recovering, his compatriots are actively theorizing about the motives behind the incident in their blogs, and the proprietors of the bookstore-café that sponsored the event are uneasy and hoping to avoid notoriety.
Against a backdrop of snowfall and accompanied by the jazz strains of “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square,” a memorial service for the legendary W. W. Norton editor Carol Houck Smith, who died late last year at the age of eighty-five, was held recently at St. Peter’s Church in New York City.
Award-winning poet Lucia Perillo would just as soon surrender the idea of a readership altogether and focus on what truly matters—great poetry.
What began for Robin Romm as an exercise in navigating the loss of her mother evolved into a memoir, The Mercy Papers: A Memoir of Three Weeks, published this month by Scribner. She recently spoke about transitioning from fiction to nonfiction, and back again, and the difficulty of releasing a memoir into the world.
On a morning marked with the waving of tiny American flags and tears running down cold cheeks, friends and family and strangers hugged each other for warmth and in celebration—all of us united under a banner of words.
