Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—publishing reports, literary dispatches, academic announcements, and more—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today’s stories.
The winners of the Believer Book Awards, which celebrate “the best-written and most underappreciated books of the year,” were announced yesterday. The fiction winner was Long Live the Post Horn! by Vigdis Hjorth, translated by Charlotte Barslund; the nonfiction prize went to The Lonely Letters by Ashon T. Crawley; and Yona Harvey earned the poetry award for You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love. This year the organizers also launched a graphic narrative category: The inaugural winner was Odessa by Jonathan Hill.
Booksellers at Skylight Books in Los Angeles have formed a union, becoming an affiliate of the Communications Workers of America Union, which supports a membership of more than 700,000 workers. Skylight management has voluntarily recognized the union, according to an update on the union’s new Twitter account. (Publishers Weekly)
“I enjoy cultivating a raggedness, a rawness in what I do—I don’t think in perfectly curated sentences, or in very explicit sentences, so to me it seems counterintuitive to attempt to write in that way.” Ailsa McFarlane, the author of Highway Blue, describes herself as a perfectionist who still enjoys “a certain type of imperfection.” (Entertainment Weekly)
The Texas Commission on the Arts has selected Cyrus Cassells to serve as the 2021 Texas Poet Laureate and Lupe Mendez to serve the 2022 term. Mendez is the Houston literary outreach coordinator for Poets & Writers. (Sightlines)
Paul Von Drasek, whom Publishers Weekly describes as “a well-known and beloved fixture on the Twin Cities literary scene,” died on Sunday at age seventy-one. Von Drasek wore many hats over the course of his career: He started out as a bookseller before moving into sales, going on to lead the sales teams at various publishers, including Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Capstone Publishers. He also served on the boards of several literary nonprofits.
Lexicographer Katherine Barber died last month at age sixty-one due to cancer. She helped pioneer the record-keeping of Canadian English as the founding editor of Canadian Oxford Dictionary. (New York Times)
Andrew Weber will step down from his role as global COO of Macmillan at the end of the month in order to move to a different company. Stefan von Holtzbrinck, CEO of Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, which owns Macmillan, praised Weber for his “collegiality, human warmth and…eye for talent.” (Shelf Awareness)
“I am still drawn to places that don’t welcome humans, places where people have once lived and now have left.” Claire Fuller, the author of Unsettled Ground, recommends seven books that feature “uninhabitable” houses. (Electric Literature)
