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:
Just ahead of the four hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, on April 23, another copy of a First Folio has been discovered on a small Scottish island. The three-volume Folio was published in 1623, and contains thirty-six of Shakespeare’s plays. This discovery brings the number of known First Folios to 234. (New York Times)
Calvin Trillin’s poem in the latest issue of the New Yorker, “Have They Run Out of Provinces Yet?” has come under fire from readers who found the poem to be xenophobic and insulting to Chinese culture. Trillin told the Guardian the poem was simply a way of “making fun of food-obsessed bourgeoisie,” but his explanation has not satisfied writers including novelist Celeste Ng, who wrote on Twitter, “‘It’s satire!’ should not be used as a safety net for poorly conceived, poorly executed, or unwisely published pieces.” Jezebel and Seattle’s the Stranger have published critical responses to the poem. (New York Times)
The Guggenheim Foundation has announced its 2016 fellowships. A total of 175 fellowships were awarded to 178 individuals, including poets Jericho Brown and Deborah Landau, fiction writers Jennifer Clement and Laila Lalami, and nonfiction writers Adam Kirsch and Paul Lisicky.
“I wanted to incorporate the poets from the Black Arts Movement into the canon of comics. Those are the people who taught [me] how to write. Those were the writers who made space in their poetry to explore questions of democracy and self-determination.” National Book Award–winning author Ta-Nehisi Coates discusses writing Marvel’s new Black Panther series of comics, and what he wants to accomplish with his efforts. (New Republic)
“In marketing African fiction, the conventional practice among publishers both in Africa and the west has been to simply tag a novel to a social issue.” Writer Ainehi Edoro explores the biases in publishing African novels, and how African fiction is marketed and talked about, “not on the basis of its aesthetic value but of its thematic preoccupation.” (Guardian)
Ohio’s first ever poet laureate, Amit Majmudar, is also a radiologist. At NPR, Majmudar discusses the intersections and between poetry and medicine, and his latest poetry collection, Dothead.
The artistic director of last month’s COMMENCEZ! Paris-Beckett ’16 Festival, which celebrated writer Samuel Beckett’s life in Paris, reflects on the challenges of curating a program embodying the relationship of the literary figure with the place he or she lived. (Irish Times)
