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 Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy, the XPRIZE Foundation, and the Dollar General Literacy Foundation have partnered to launch the $7 million Adult Literacy XPRIZE, a global competition that challenges teams to create the most effective adult literacy mobile application. The initiative aims to produce a new approach to adult literacy education on a global scale. Teams will have eighteen months to develop their apps; the top five will then be field-tested with adult learners with low literacy skills over a twelve-month period, and the grand prize will be awarded to the application that demonstrates the best performance over the twelve months. (Yahoo News)
As the United States and Cuba take steps toward normalizing relations, inaugural poet Richard Blanco and writer Ruth Behar have introduced “Bridges to/from Cuba,” an online writing forum featuring prose and poetry from Cuban scholars, poets, and celebrities. Blanco and Behar, both Cuban-Americans, hope “Bridges to/from Cuba” will repair the country’s image through the “real lives and complex emotional histories of thousands of Cuban-Americans and Cubans across the globe.” (Associated Press)
Former president of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts Reynold Levy has been elected to the National Book Foundation board of directors. David Steinberger, the chair of the National Book Foundation, stated that Levy’s wide range of experience will help to raise the profile and awareness of the National Book Awards outside of the publishing industry. (Publishers Weekly)
“I sometimes wonder, in the teeth of a literary critical tradition that has always told us the writer’s personality is irrelevant to any appraisal of the work, whether one of the pleasures of literature isn’t precisely this contemplation of the enigma of the person creating it.” Tim Parks considers the person behind the work for the New York Review of Books.
A proposed government mandate in Russia would require Russian publishers to produce digital editions of all their new books. The Russian Book Chamber (RBC) has publicly opposed the mandate, fearing a collapse of the Russian publishing industry from potential sales losses and digital piracy. (Publishing Perspectives)
On June 15 in New York City, the Poetry Society of New York will relaunch The Typewriter Project, a collaborative writing project in which the public is invited to compose poems on typewriters (each fed with a hundred-foot paper scroll) installed in Tompkins Square Park. The project, which provides an interactive way for the public to engage with the written word, will be set up for one month, after which the scrolls will be collected and later displayed at the New York City Poetry Festival on July 25 and 26.
“Is it possible that what we think of as genre boundaries are things that have been invented fairly recently by the publishing industry? I can see there’s a case for saying there are certain patterns….But I get worried when readers and writers take these boundaries too seriously, and think that something strange happens when you cross them, and that you should think very carefully before doing so.” At the New Statesman, best-selling authors Neil Gaiman and Kazuo Ishiguro converse about storytelling, the stigmatization and political implications of genre, and more.
