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 2019 Best Translated Book Awards were announced at the New York Rights Fair last night. The poetry prize went to Hilda Hilst’s Of Death. Minimal Odes (translated from the Portugese by Laura Cesarco Eglin) and the fiction prize went to Patrick Chamoiseau’s novel Slave Old Man (translated from the French and Creole by Linda Coverdale). (Millions)
“I am trying to give people a tool to be able to use writing to recover from trauma, PTSD, from addiction, to use it whenever they feel like they are in need.” As Houston’s new poet laureate, Leslie Contreras Schwartz plans to teach writing as a tool to heal and empower. (Houston Public Media)
At BOMB magazine, Leslie Carol Roberts talks about her new eco-memoir, Here Is Where I Walk, and how non-scientists can appreciate and protect nature. “I believe that ordinary people are going to be the ones saving the world during the sixth mass extinction, through creative imagination. We need to start telling better stories about the present and the future.”
“I can just still pick up the book and crack up.” At NPR, Mary Miller finds humor in the misanthropic protagonist of her latest novel, Biloxi, admitting that she and the “really unlikable” character might have some similarities.
BookExpo kicked off yesterday with a keynote panel featuring Sourcebooks publisher and CEO Dominique Raccah, Hachette Audio vice president and associate publisher Kim Sayle, and author Jacqueline Woodson. Moderated by New York magazine’s Genevieve Smith, the discussion covered the complementary roles of reading and listening, the need for diversity in the publishing industry, and more. (Publishers Weekly)
“Gregg’s attention to the inner life was informed by affliction as much as by blessing, but she was fundamentally awake to beauty.” Gabriel Fine remembers the prolific vision of the poet Linda Gregg, who died in March. (Los Angeles Review of Books)
TIME recommends thirty-two forthcoming beach reads that ask big questions, including This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto by Suketu Mehta and Everything Inside by Edwidge Danticat.
“I’m now writing what is essentially a coming-of-age novel—something most writers tackle when they are in their twenties—because it took me forty years to reach a point where I felt I could approach Detroit’s complexity in a novel and succeed.” Lisa Lenzo on writing about her hometown in her new story collection, Unblinking. (Rumpus)
