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:
The Awl and the Hairpin have announced they will both close at the end of the month, citing difficulties securing sufficient advertising. The websites, both published under the Awl Network, were founded in 2009 and 2010, respectively. (Wall Street Journal)
Poets Fred Moten and Molly McCully Brown, fiction writer Susan Muaddi Darraj, and nonfiction writer Lucas Mann have won $50,000 grants from United States Artists.
South African poet and activist Keorapetse Kgositsile died earlier this month at age seventy-nine. Kgositsile’s work “addressed themes of black solidarity, displacement, and anticolonialism with an uncompromising directness.” (New York Times)
The National Endowment for the Humanities has launched a new grant program to support the infrastructure of humanities organizations, with grants of up to $750,000.
Biographer Robert Caro talks with the New York Review of Books about his work on the final installment of his five-volume biography of Lyndon B. Johnson, what he wants to write next, and his research process.
Diane Shipley considers the historical precedent behind the trend to organize bookshelves with the spines facing inward. (Guardian)
Walt Hunter close-reads Emma Lazarus’s sonnet “The New Colossus,” arguing that it is often misread and that “to marshal [it] in support of a redefinition of American greatness…is to capitulate to the terms of Trump’s exceptionalism.” (Atlantic)
“We live in Philip K. Dick’s future, not George Orwell’s or Aldous Huxley’s.” Henry Farrell considers the worlds depicted in Philip K. Dick’s novels. (Boston Review)
