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:
Publishers Weekly checks in with Goodreads, which celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. The online reading community now has 65 million users and 214,000 author accounts.
At the start of a new school year, Clint Smith discusses how James Baldwin’s essay “A Talk to Teachers” helps him teach in politically fraught times. “[It] showed me that a teacher’s work should reject the false pretense of being apolitical, and, instead, confront the problems that shape our students’ lives.” (New Yorker)
“Landscape is what’s most important. I like nature and the sky. The sky is just always there. It’s a big, beautiful, empty place to go up. Clouds come upon you at different times. You could be in the city all the time, and you don’t see the sky, then, suddenly you’re in the country and there it is—it’s just, like, this creature.” Eileen Myles talks with the Creative Independent about writing and performing.
Robert Frost’s house in Shaftsbury, Vermont, has been gifted to Bennington College by the Friends of Robert Frost. Frost lived in the house for several years, a period during which he wrote his famous poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” (Bennington.edu)
Scholars have found a lost essay by George Moses Horton, a slave who lived in North Carolina in the early 1800s and was the first black person in the South to publish a book. (New York Times)
TV writer Chris Harris talks with NPR about his new book for kids, I’m Just No Good at Rhyming, and shares some poems from the title.
Open Culture takes a closer look at Luigi Serafini’s 1981 Codex Seraphinianus, an encyclopedia of imaginary things written in a made-up language.
“Homelessness traumatizes its victims. We might even call it a triple trauma. First, your life falls apart: family and friends shut their doors; your belongings disappear. This is a kind of living death. Then you’re traumatized again, separately but relatedly, by the stress of living in danger.” Writer John Cotter chronicles his month teaching writing in a Colorado homeless shelter. (Guernica)
