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:
“Here was a moment, an hour, where there’s order, where there’s humor, where there’s love in a place that looks like your home.” Sonia Manzano—who after forty-four years as Maria on Sesame Street recently announced her retirement from the program—has a memoir coming out tomorrow from Scholastic. In Becoming Maria: Love and Chaos in the South Bronx, Manzano writes about growing up in a Puerto Rican family in the Bronx in the fifties and sixties, enduring violence and discovering the importance of humor, and how she got to Sesame Street. (NPR)
James Baldwin’s FBI file contains nearly two thousand pages of documents, collected from 1960 until the early 1970s—a period during which the author was followed and harassed by the federal government. In a new biography of the author, All Those Strangers, Douglas Field explores these files in an attempt to answer the question, Why did the FBI spy on James Baldwin? (Intercept)
The Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin has acquired Kazuo Ishiguro’s archive for a reported $1.1 million. Among the unpublished works included in the archive are an early pulp western and a novella called To Remember a Summer By. (Guardian)
Ten years after Hurricane Katrina, a writer who grew up in New Orleans looks back on her home, her family’s displacement, and the house that was destroyed in the storm. (New Yorker)
The winners of this year’s Hugo Awards—the prestigious voter-driven awards given annually for books of science fiction and fantasy—were announced Saturday night in Spokane, Washington. While the Best Novel award was given to The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (Tor, translated by Ken Liu), making it the first novel in translation to win the award, a group of authors calling themselves the “Sad Puppies”—comprised mostly of straight, white, male writers who argue that writers like themselves are being shut out by what they call “affirmative action” voting—took control of the vote, leaving five categories without awards. (Wired)
“Writing is an obsessive enterprise. Even when we think we’ve abandoned our characters for the day they work themselves in our consciousness.” At Literary Hub, Jill Bialosky—an executive editor at Norton and the author of the forthcoming novel The Prize—writes about working on both sides of a book.
From a rustic studio in Glouchestershire, England, to a cluttered desk in Carmel Valley, California, six authors—including Jane Smiley, Jeanette Winterson, and Valeria Luiselli—share their writing spaces. (T Magazine.)
