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 New York Times features a profile of literary editor Chris Jackson, who has played a key role in changing the publishing industry’s diversity problems by ushering in great works by many diverse and marginalized writers including Victor LaValle, Mat Johnson, and National Book Award–winner Ta-Nehisi Coates. “The great tradition of black art, generally, is the ability—unlike American art in general –to tell the truth,” Jackson says. “Because it was formed around the great American poison, the thing that poisoned American consciousness and behavior: racism. And black culture, such as it is, was formed around a necessary resistance to this fundamental lie. That’s the obligation. And this is the power that black art has.”
Writer Lili Anolik examines the early life of author Joan Didion, before she became “a cultural icon who changed Los Angeles’s perception of itself.” Anolik suggests that Didion became more than a person and writer, but a place—Hollywood—and that “Didion alone was the vehicle—or possibly the agent—of L.A.’s destruction. I think that for the city of Los Angeles, Didion is the Ángel de la Muerte.” (Vanity Fair)
In ten years, those voices in your head may actually be real, and they will be translating another language for you. Innovations in bioacoustic engineering have led to the creation of a small earpiece that will translate a foreign language as it is spoken. Will these machines tear down the universal language barrier? We’ll report back in 2026. (Wall Street Journal)
A £250,000 donation from Virginia Woolf’s great niece will go towards benefiting Charleston, a seventeenth century farmhouse in Sussex, England, that once hosted an array of artists and writers from the Bloomsbury Group. The hope is that the donation will kick-start the project of turning Charleston back into a “living artistic environment,” which will feature an art gallery, creative studio, and archive store. (Bookseller)
In celebration of James Joyce’s 134th birthday, a group of academics have launched a new online project that has set the author’s classic and “infamously difficult novel,” Finnegan’s Wake,” to music. The project, Waywords and Meansigns, features seventeen songs by seventeen different musicians around the world, which coincide with the book’s seventeen chapters. The creators of Waywords and Meansigns hope this auditory project will help make the work more accessible, “but simultaneously, we want to appeal to people who really know and love his text—and that is why we did it unabridged,” says Derek Pyle, the project’s director. (Guardian)
Over at the Millions, fiction writer Alexander Chee talks about his writing life fifteen years after publishing his first novel, Edinburgh, and the release of his new novel, The Queen of the Night, out today from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
“It’s strange to keep confronting, in these stylistic ways, how you were constructed. What you were constructed to be in the world.” At Bomb, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Margo Jefferson discusses her recent memoir, Negroland.
