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:
Television personality, celebrity chef, and writer Anthony Bourdain has died at age sixty-one. Bourdain wrote many popular nonfiction books, including the memoirs Kitchen Confidential and A Cook’s Tour. (CNN)
Susan Howe and Billy-Ray Belcourt have won the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prizes. Howe won the International Prize for her collection Debths; Belcourt won the Canadian prize for his collection, This Wound Is a World. They each received $65,000 Canadian.
The National Endowment for the Arts reports that poetry readership is the highest it has ever been in fifteen years, with 12 percent of adults—28 million people—reporting that they read poetry in the last year. Only 6.7 percent of adults reported reading poetry in 2012. (Arts Works Blog)
PBS NewsHour visits Books For Africa’s warehouse of books in Atlanta; the organization has collected and donated more than 41 million books to schools and libraries in fifty-three countries.
The editors of the New York Times explain how they put together the newspaper’s best-seller lists.
“By keeping known, active predators on a journal’s masthead, it hands these bad actors cultural capital with which to lure and harm more victims. By giving an abuser a platform, Boston Review is widening a dangerous net.” VIDA’s Board of Directors has written a letter in response to the Boston Review’s decision to retain Junot Díaz as its fiction editor.
In honor of Gwendolyn Brooks's birthday yesterday, sculptor Margo McMahon has installed a bronze statue of the famed poet in a park in Chicago’s South Side. (Chicago Tribune)
The New York Times profiles popular Instagram poet Yrsa Daley-Ward. “We are doing the poetry world a service,” says Ward. “I think it is a wonderful thing that poets are now sharing their work online because work gets into the hands of people of different identities and they feel like they have a voice.”
