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:
Claudia Rankine has written a play, The White Card, which premiered on Saturday in Boston. Performed by the American Repertory Theater, the play centers around a dinner party where a black woman artist talks with a group of white people about race. “I began to think, you know, we really don’t know how to talk about race in a sustained way,” Rankine says of writing the play. “And it would be lovely to have that conversation.” (Boston Magazine)
Ratha Tep travels to Cornwall, England, to visit the places that inspired a young Virginia Woolf, including the house in St. Ives that Woolf drew on for To the Lighthouse. (New York Times)
Publishers Weekly tells the story of how Beacon Press came to publish a portion of the Pentagon Papers in 1971. The papers revealed the extent of U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War.
“Although a fundamentally female experience, pregnancy exists in literature, when it does so at all, as a male problem.” Jessie Greengrass considers why literature, particularly fiction, ignores pregnancy. (Guardian)
Colossal revisits Jorge Méndez Blake’s 2007 art installation, “The Castle,” which features a 75’ by 13’ brick wall built on top of a copy of Franz Kafka’s The Castle.
At Electric Literature, Carmen Maria Machado, Rosalind Palermo Stevenson, Matthew Cheney, and Sofia Samatar discuss the speculative memoir.
A 2017 survey found that more than 50 percent of Japanese university students do not read for pleasure. (Japan Times)
From Coca-Cola to Microsoft and Under Armour, poetry is cropping up more and more in advertising campaigns. (Adweek)
The Guardian interviews Marilynne Robinson about faith and modern Christianity, what she’s reading right now, and what she’s writing next.
