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:
Transparent creator and LGBTQ activist Jill Soloway will launch a new book imprint, Topple Books, with Amazon Publishing. The imprint, whose first titles will be released in 2019, will focus on works by women of color, as well as writers who identify as queer and/or gender nonconforming. (Publishers Weekly)
Yesterday an Alabama Court unsealed Harper Lee’s will, which had been kept private since the author’s death in February 2016. The will dictates that most of Lee’s literary assets be transferred to a trust she formed in 2011, leaving open questions of who will control her estate and literary papers. (New York Times)
“I will always feel an ethical responsibility as a poet because I will always feel an ethical responsibility as a person, as we all should; the truck driver, the engineer, the painter, the prince, the writer, the biologists, all have a responsibility just by being.” National youth poet laureate Amanda Gorman talks about poetry and race. (New York Times)
To read more about Gorman and the night she was announced national youth poet laureate, check out this Poets & Writers exclusive.
The Poetry Coalition announced its second annual programming initiative, Where My Dreaming and My Loving Live: Poetry & the Body. More than twenty organizations that make up the coalition will host events and publish work on the theme of poetry and the body. (Academy of American Poets)
Read about how the Poetry Coalition got started last year in the March/April 2017 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Hillary Clinton will deliver a lecture on closing night of the PEN World Voices Festival, followed by a conversation with writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The festival, which will be held in New York City in April, will revolve around the theme “Resist and Reimagine.”
After hearing that writer Emma Hannigan’s cancer is now terminal, a group of Irish writers have successfully campaigned to make her book Letters to My Daughters the No. 1 best-seller in Ireland. Hannigan has also raised more than €70,000 for cancer charities. (Guardian)
On Tuesday, singer Dolly Parton and her nonprofit Imagination Library donated the organization’s hundred millionth book to the Library of Congress. Parton started the nonprofit in 1995 to honor her father, who never learned to read; the organization now donates a million books a month to families and kids. (Washington Post)
