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 Foundation for Contemporary Arts has announced the new C. D. Wright Award for Poetry, an annual prize of $40,000 given to a poet over the age of fifty whose work “exemplifies Wright’s vibrant lyricism, seriousness, and striking originality.” Read more at the Grants & Awards blog.
After the Washington Post published an article demeaning Jane Austen as a spinster, Jane Austen Twitter mobilized “like it was a sports hot take” to defend the writer. (A.V. Club)
“We get the testimony of the senses, the power of words in new and arresting combinations, and an unwavering belief in what Keats called the ‘holiness of the heart’s affections.’ I am so grateful to the vivid individuals I met on the page this year, proof of hope and life in a very crushing time.” New Yorker poetry critic Dan Chiasson shares the poetry he was grateful for this year.
“Moten’s writings feel like a Charlie Parker solo, or a Basquiat painting, in their gleeful yet deadly serious attempt to capture the profusion of ideas in flight.” Harvard Magazine profiles critic and poet Fred Moten.
The Guardian takes a look at the stories, illustrations, and letters from Santa that J. R. R. Tolkien wrote for his children on Christmas.
After writer and historian Ta-Nehisi Coates and philosopher Cornel West got into a Twitter feud earlier this week—West accused Coates of “fetishizing white supremacy”—Coates has quit Twitter. (New York Times)
“When I was writing, it felt as if I was getting closer and closer, day by day, to a certain part inside us which cannot be destroyed, which cannot be harmed.” South Korean novelist Han Kang talks with the Guardian about her favorite books, writing through illness, and why she doesn’t like to meet writers.
“We are arriving at the end of a punishing and brutal year. I propose that there is no superior beverage to close out 2017, a little something to soften and soothe.” At the New Yorker, Carmen Maria Machado writes in praise of eggnog.
