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.
“Our inability to have conversations is manifesting as a national crisis.” Poet Claudia Rankine on using her first play, The White Card, to imagine what a continued discussion of race could look like. (Millions)
Meanwhile at NPR, Jennifer Eberhardt talks about her new book, Biased, and why the only way to manage racial bias is to acknowledge it. “When we try not to see color, we don’t see discrimination, so ironically an attempt at color blindness can lead to more racial inequality, rather than less.”
Publishers Weekly has named Ann Arbor’s Literati the bookstore of the year. Cindy Heidemann of Publishers Group West and Two Rivers Press was named rep of the year.
“When I got the book deal, I’d excitedly tell people and they’d inevitably ask: ‘Did you get an advance?’ And like most chats about money, the conversation would abruptly stop there.” Alex Holder on revealing his advance, and why more authors should do the same. (Guardian)
“The substance of our lives is continuously parsed, analyzed, and extracted to become part of storylines we know nothing about.” Pola Oloixarac on scripting Google Assistant, and who’s really writing this novel. (Literary Hub)
In the latest installment of the By the Book series, novelist Richard Powers reveals he’s a fan of reading books about “diatoms and stars, things from four hundred million years ago or a hundred thousand years from now.” (New York Times)
Aimee Johnston reports on her new job: selling books barefoot in the Maldives. (Irish Times)
It’s the end of month, and the conclusion of “March-madness” literary tournaments. Catch up on all the action in the Tournament of Books, March Vladness, NYPL’s #LiteraryMarchMadness, and Lit Mag Madness. Meanwhile, voting for March Book Madness, a bracket-style tournament dedicated to reading in schools, continues until April 2.
