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:
“Love it or loathe it, chafe at it or cheer it; you will now see, for the first time, what it looks like when Clinton doesn’t spend all of her energy suppressing her irritation.” Jennifer Senior reviews Hillary Clinton’s new book about the 2016 election, What Happened, released today by Simon & Schuster. (New York Times)
The colony of six-toed cats that live at Ernest Hemingway’s former home in Key West, Florida, has survived Hurricane Irma, which stormed through the state over the weekend. (Washington Post)
The National Book Foundation has announced the longlist for the 2017 National Book Award in Young People’s Literature. The longlists in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction will be announced this week.
On the twenty-second anniversary of Jane Kenyon’s death, poet Donald Hall remembers his wife and how his poetry changed during their marriage and Kenyon’s illness. (New Yorker)
Later this month, Macmillan will republish A. A. Milne’s 1939 memoir, It’s Too Late Now, which relates many of the struggles the writer faced—the derision of critics and an estrangement from his son, Christopher Robin—after the success of his Winnie-the-Pooh books. (Guardian)
“I think about the issues and big ideas when I’m thinking about novel ideas, but once I begin writing I throw that all out the window because the work is able to come alive and these people are able to live when you immerse yourself in the world.” Jesmyn Ward discusses writing about racial tensions, fiction versus creative nonfiction, and her latest novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing. (Millions)
Adam Kirsch makes a case for A. E. Housman as the quintessential English poet, whose work shows “an Englishness whose sources are nature and memory, melancholy and reserve.” (Atlantic)
PBS NewsHour takes a close look at San Quentin Artists, a website that publishes art and poetry made by death row inmates at San Quentin State, California’s oldest prison.
“This music, this way of hymning directly to God, was my first conscious experience of mellifluous charged language, and it’s the bedrock upon which I’ve built my understanding of poetry as a craft and as a meditative practice.” Kaveh Akbar talks about how he came to poetry through prayer. (Literary Hub)
