Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—publishing reports, literary dispatches, academic announcements, and more—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today’s stories.
Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, the author of The Nest, has established a new fellowship program to support students from communities underrepresented in publishing who are seeking to enroll in the Columbia Publishing Course. Administered by D’Aprix Sweeney’s publisher, Ecco, the program will award full-ride scholarships to two students from a group of historically Black colleges and universities every year for the next five years. Daniel Halpern, the president and publisher of Ecco, and a rotating committee of Black writers will select recipients. (Publishers Weekly)
“Having a Black child in America has always been an act of faith.” In the new issue of Harper’s, novelist Naomi Jackson recounts her experience with pregnancy and childbirth, and examines how racism in healthcare threatens Black mothers and children.
“I want people to be proud of themselves for being resilient. It is an act of triumph to surpass challenges and traumas. I just don’t want it to have to be the only way of life.” Novelist Jami Attenberg reflects on the risks of idealizing resilience. (New York Times)
Fatima Bhutto discusses writing a novel about the young people who join extremist movements and accessing compassion for her characters. “I mourned the fact that they didn’t have other choices, that they would never again have other choices.” (NPR)
“Lovecraft may have been one of the twentieth century’s most influential writers, but he was also one of its most gallingly racist.” Aja Romano recaps the ongoing cultural reckoning with the racism of horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. (Vox)
“I have a pretty material sense of a story, in that I think about it as a little object, a little statuette whose shape is determined by the distribution of little pockets of weighted sentences.” Joon Oluchi Lee discusses the vignettes that make up his new novella, Neotenica. (Lambda Literary Review)
Hephzibah Anderson shares observations about the early manuscripts of classic works by Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, and Mary Shelley, among others. (BBC)
Nishta J. Mehra, the author of Brown White Black, answers the Book Marks Questionnaire.
