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:
PEN America’s annual report on banned books has revealed a shift in recent years in censoring more books that represent diverse points of view. The analysis states that children’s books “by or about people of color, people who identify as LGBT, and people with disabilities (‘diverse books’) are significantly more likely to be challenged or banned even as they make up a disproportionately small fraction of all published literature.” (Electric Literature)
In better diverse book news, eleven-year-old Marley Dias, who launched the nationally successful book drive #1000BlackGirlBooks last year, has edited a zine for Elle.com. As Dias writes in her editors note, Marley Mag is “about women and girls who have left their imprint on the world,” and aims to “elevate the voices of all those who have been ignored and left out.”
VIDA: Women in Literary Arts recently launched an interview series with writers featured in the forthcoming anthology Bettering American Poetry, whose aim is to “[reflect] a ranging plurality of voices in American poetry and illuminate the possibilities of sharing space.”
Creative nonfiction writer Maggie Nelson talks with the Los Angeles Times about receiving a MacArthur “Genius” fellowship and how her poetry background informs the risks she takes in her nonfiction writing.
Meanwhile, fiction and nonfiction writer Kashana Cauley discusses Intersections, the regular column she writes for Catapult. “I aim to tell entertaining, partially personal, partially data-based and fact-driven stories that, if the reader wants, will give them a different way of looking at a corner of the world.”
At the Smart Set, author and professor Paula Marantz Cohen considers the legacy and later works of Henry James. In July, the U.S. Postal Office issued an eighty-nine-cent stamp in honor of the author.
