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:
VIDA: Woman in Literary Arts has released its 2014 VIDA Count. The annual VIDA Count reveals gender imbalances in major literary publications, including the Times Literary Supplement, the Paris Review, Granta, and many others. This year also marks the first annual Women of Color VIDA Count. Of this new effort, VIDA cofounder Erin Belieu said, “VIDA is aware that the WOC Count does not stand as statistical data, but we have included the materials gathered as part of our presentation this year in order for the larger public to understand the complications of race as a thorny construct, having mostly to do with how we perceive ourselves and how others perceive us.”
Princeton University has acquired Jacques Derrida’s personal library. The French literary critic and philosopher, revered as the “Father of Deconstructionism,” died in 2004. Derrida’s library includes over 13,800 books and scholarly materials. (Los Angeles Times)
A New York City–based theater group is in the process of creating a short film for each of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets. The New York Shakespeare Exchange started the Sonnet Project in 2013. The group films each sonnet in a different NYC location, and has since completed one hundred films. With fifty-four sonnets left, the final film is to be completed next spring. (New York Times)
“Writing poetry for me was a way of creating identity, one that I didn’t have.” Read part two of Adam Fitzgerald’s interview with late poet Mark Strand at the Boston Review.
In the latest installment of the Poetry Foundation’s PoetryNow radio series, Rae Armantrout reads and discusses her poem “Life’s Work.”
“Novels bring people back from the dead on the page, only to kill them a second time—to cast them into the past tense. The magic of fiction is an apparent resurrection.” At the Guardian, literary critic James Wood talks about his new nonfiction book The Nearest Thing to Life and fiction’s unique ability to redeem and shape lives.
Publishers Penguin Random House and Hachette Book Group have each issued statements commending Indiana lawmakers for amending the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a state law that originally allowed businesses to discriminate against gay people. Both publishers have warehouses in the state. (Publishers Weekly)
