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:
“We belong to a legacy of navigation that teaches us how to read the stars, waves, currents, winds, and horizons.” Poet Craig Santos Perez provides an introduction to Pacific Islander poetry. (Poetry)
Following last week’s tragic deaths of Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, and five Dallas police officers, poet Claudia Rankine speaks with NPR’s Lynn Neary about the state of race relations in America. Rankine’s 2014 book Citizen: An American Lyric, is acclaimed as a critical and incisive account of racism in the United States.
South African writer Lidudumalingani, winner of this year’s prestigious Caine Prize, discusses Africa’s publishing industry and the new literary magazines and nonprofits on the continent that provide outlets for emerging fiction and poetry writers. (Guardian)
At Hyperallergic, poet John Yau considers the particular confessional mode of Tim Dlugos’s poetry. “The pared down vernacular that Dlugos got from O’Hara and Williams is always linked to immediate, everyday perceptions filtered through a particular consciousness; it is evidence of his engagement with the present, fully aware that he has little time left in this world.”
Following a year of threats and petitions to press criminal charges on Tamil writer Perumal Murugan, an Indian high court ruling has upheld the author’s freedom of expression. Murugan stopped writing last year after a Hindu extremist group coordinated protests of the publication of his novel Madhorubhagan, during which the group burned copies of the book and threatened the safety of the writer and his family. (Gulf Times)
This year marks the fortieth anniversary of the Just Buffalo Literary Center in Buffalo, New York. The center hosts both in-school and summer writing programs for youths, as well as reading series, author lectures, and community literary projects. (Publishers Weekly)
The New York Times features an article about Danny Strong’s directorial debut Rebel in the Rye, a biopic about author J. S. Salinger. The film is based on Kenneth Slawenski’s 2010 book J. D. Salinger: A Life, which focuses on the author’s early life leading up to the publication of The Catcher in the Rye.
