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:
Competing today in the Rio Olympics, professional long-distance runner Alexi Pappas is also a filmmaker, actress, and poet. At PBS NewsHour, Pappas speaks about her love of writing, and the intersections between poetry and running. “What I find with writing that is so special, and in poetry in particular, is there’s such an economy of words. I like having absolute freedom within boundaries. And in running, similarly, there are limitations…. In a race, you might have a certain lane that you have to stay in or a certain number of laps or a course. But within those boundaries, there’s so much room for freedom and creativity.”
Not all of the Olympic action is taking place in Rio. Librarians at the University of Dayton held their own Librarian Olympics last week. Events included “Journal Jenga” and speed-sorting books. (Smithsonian)
“I believe in art the way other people believe in God. I’m not trying to make a tricky sentence. It’s just true.” Novelist and nonfiction writer Lidia Yuknavitch talks about her path to writing, rejecting tidy narratives, and the beauty to be found in the misfit’s journey. (Lenny Letter)
Today marks thirty years since the publication of Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize–winning graphic novel Maus. Spiegelman speaks with the Washington Post’s Michael Cavna about the residual impact of Maus, a project that Cavna calls a “game-changer” that “led the American public, including many literary critics, toward seeing comics as a serious art form.”
“Plots are ghostly things in our brains.” At Vulture, Christian Lorentzen considers the Western history of narrative plot and what readers look for in plot today.
PEN has revived its PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. The annual $50,000 award will honor a writer born or residing outside of the United States for a body of work that “evoke[s] to some measure Nabokov’s brilliant versatility and commitment to literature as a search for the deepest truth and the highest pleasure.” The original prize, which was worth $20,000 was given biennially from 2000 to 2008.
“What the American writer faces abroad now is no longer antiquity or the exotic Other but a variation on her own frail modernity.” Writers Siddartha Deb and Charles McGrath discuss the impulse for contemporary American fiction writers to send their characters abroad. (New York Times)
Tsehai Publishers, a Los Angeles–based press focused on African issues, is launching a new imprint honoring Harriet Tubman. The imprint—Harriet Tubman Press—will launch this fall and publish African American works of fiction, nonfiction, and academic titles. (Publishers Weekly)
