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:
Minneapolis, Minnesota, is hosting the first ever Little Free Library festival on May 21. The festival centerpiece is a workshop on building Little Free Libraries, during which festival attendees can learn how to build their own boxes, as well as help construct a hundred new structures that will be distributed to communities nationwide. (Smithsonian)
Meanwhile, Minneapolis–based independent press Milkweed Editions is set to open a brick and mortar independent bookstore—Milkweed Books—in late June. In addition to Milkweed titles, the store’s inventory will be “closely curated very much from our perspective, [with] an indie press sensibility. We will sell more books published by our colleagues in the indie press world,” says Milkweed’s publisher and CEO Daniel Slager. (Publishers Weekly)
Susan Delvalle has been named the new president and executive director of Creative Capital, a pioneering artist funding and professional development organization. Delvalle previously served as executive director of the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling, and as director of external affairs at El Museo de Barrio in New York. Delvalle succeeds Ruby Lerner, the founder of Creative Capital, who announced that she would step down in 2015 after seventeen years in the role. Creative Capital’s awards program has given nearly $40 million in financial and advisory support to 511 projects by 642 writers and artists since 1999.
May is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. NBC News celebrates the work and accomplishments of emerging Asian American poets including Ocean Vuong, Mai Der Vang, Janine Joseph, and Rajiv Mohabir.
Walt Whitman: The Brand. An article at Collectors Weekly considers how businesses have capitalized on the poet’s image, starting in the late Nineteenth Century and continuing today, using the Leaves of Grass writer’s likeness to sell everything from coffee, to cigars, to craft beer.
Poet Christopher Soto (aka Loma) talks with fellow trans writer and activist Joshua Jennifer Espinoza about Nepantla: A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color, the Undocupoets Campaign, LGBTQ youth homelessness, and Soto’s newest chapbook, Sad Girl Poems, which complicates the figure of the “sad girl” in music and popular culture that often fails to account for experiences of trans people of color. “My work is upset with the simplicity of ‘white girl sadness.’ My work is upset because it is not afforded such simplicity…. The poor are never allowed to hurt in private; we must perform and display our sadness in order to survive. We must let our sadness be seen by [broader communities] so that we can get help.” (Los Angeles Review of Books)
“The article you send me is a plausible lie, and I hate it,” wrote D. H. Lawrence to philosopher Bertrand Russell in 1915. At the New Republic, William Giraldi looks at the enduring “art” of literary hate mail.
