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Articles from Poet & Writers Magazine include material from the print edition plus exclusive online-only material.
For many writers groups and nonprofit literary organizations battered by the recession, help is on the way. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which was signed into law by president Barack Obama in February, included fifty million dollars in arts funding that is being allocated by the National Endowment for the Arts.
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 Wag's Revue, Poet Lore, the Glut, Portrait, Argosy, can we have our ball back?, DoubleTake, Midnight Mind Magazine, Mot Juste, Cue, and Black Clock.
Last August, Howard Junker announced that at the end of 2009 he would retire as editor of ZYZZYVA, the literary journal he founded in San Francisco in 1985. Six months later, in February, he rescinded his resignation. Junker recently spoke about his change of heart and the future of the magazine.
Almost a decade after its creation, the experimental poetry movement Flarf—in which poets prowl the Internet using random word searches, e-mail the bizarre results to one another, then distill the newly found phrases into poems that are often as disturbing as they are hilarious—is showing signs of having cleared a spot among the ranks of legitimate art forms.
A group of writing instructors and students who over the years formed a ragtag band during late-night impromptu jam sessions at the Bennington Writing Seminars released their first CD earlier this year. Titled Let's Doghouse: A Tribute to Liam Rector, the compilation serves as a memorial to the founding director of the Writing Seminars, a poet, who passed away two years ago.
On a warm, breezy Saturday evening, hundreds of people who had spent the past three days at the annual BookExpo America took a break from the hubbub to attend You Are Not Alone, a celebration featuring comedy, music, and, of course, some top-notch literature.
Contemporary literature lovers invaded ten beer-soaked bars scattered throughout Manhattan’s Lower East Side and East Village as part of the second annual Lit Crawl NYC—a two-hour bar hop serving up an eclectic taste of the New York City literary scene.
An evening with the novelist Carolyn Chute is wonderfully unliterary. This is especially true when she is reading in her native Maine.
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 Emily Chenoweth's Hello Goodbye and Loree Rackstraw's Love As Always, Kurt: Vonnegut As I Knew Him as the starting point for a closer look at these new and noteworthy titles.
Creative writers stand at the edge of a digital divide. On one side: the traditions of paper. On the other: the lure of the Internet. As glossy magazines die by the dozen and blogs become increasingly influential, we face the reality that print venues are rapidly ceding ground to Web-based publishing. Yet many of us still hesitate to make the leap.
Small Press Points highlights the happenings of the small press players. This issue features New Directions, Burning Deck, Siglio Press, Calyx Books, Fence Books, Hanging Loose Press, Slope Editions, Canarium Books, Octopus Books, Ugly Duckling Presse, Clear Cut Press, Featherproof Books, Paper Egg Books, Soft Skull Press, and Tupelo Press.
Adam Robinson started the outdoor journal Is Reads to offer the citizens of Baltimore an unusual venue for poetry—the city itself.
Four agents discuss how the economy is affecting their jobs, where they’re finding new writers, and what totally freaks them out about MFA students.
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 Witness, the Massachusetts Review, Calyx, River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative, and Oxford American.
Although the current recession is hammering all sectors of the literary economy, including publishers of books and magazines, booksellers, and service organizations—not to mention writers themselves—one of the community's smallest but most important components is proving particularly vulnerable.
Many in the publishing industry now consider Twitter—as they do Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube—an essential marketing venue for books and authors. But authors hoping to tweet their way to the social-networking top need more than a Twitter account—they need a game plan.
Last Sunday, at the sixth annual Sarah Lawrence College Poetry Festival, poets Michael and Matthew Dickman joined Dorianne Laux and her husband Joseph Millar to talk about forming a writing community.
Need a dose of inspiration for your writing routine this April? Take our Poetry Challenge and try out a new writing prompt or poetry-related assignment every day during National Poetry Month.
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.
