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:
Minneapolis-based nonprofit publisher Coffee House Press has partnered with Brooklyn publisher Emily Books to launch its first imprint in the spring of 2016. The first release under the imprint is Jade Sharma’s novel, Problems. (Publishers Weekly)
“There’s the persistent seduction of collective amnesia, our desperate wanting to embrace a mythology that we’ve evolved.” At NPR, Syreeta McFadden discusses why Claudia Rankine’s collection Citizen is an urgent and necessary book for a society that fears confronting racism.
Today is World Book Day, and children around the world are celebrating by dressing up as their favorite literary characters. Some children, however, are donning costumes from films such as Disney’s Frozen, which, unsurprisingly, has the Internet debating “what constitutes a book.” (Telegraph)
Meanwhile, at Salon, Laura Miller dissects the Internet outrage sparked by Ryan Boudinot’s essay on the questionable value of a creative writing MFA. “He hasn’t expressed anything worse than what writers outside of the MFA bubble hear every day.”
The Pubslush Foundation has given National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) a $10,000 grant, which will be used to fund NaNoWriMo’s Young Writers Program and other literacy initiatives. (GalleyCat)
Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation, a new poetry anthology edited by Brett Fletcher Lauer and Lynn Melnick, features poems by contemporary voices such as D. A. Powell and Dawn Lundy Martin. While the anthology is intended for a younger set of readers, Los Angeles Times book critic David L. Ulin notes that that the poems are really for readers of all ages.
What does writing fiction have in common with achieving happiness? Yasmina Reza discusses Jorge Luis Borges’s poem “Fragments of an Apocryphal Gospel,” and its influence on her new book Happy are the Happy, at the Atlantic’s By Heart blog.
