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.
“Let jaw, let teeth, let tongue be / between us. Let joy.” Poet Linda Gregg has died. She was seventy-six. (Graywolf Press)
Last night the Whiting Foundation announced the recipients of its 2019 awards for emerging writers. The ten winners, who each receive $50,000, are poets Kayleb Rae Candrilli, Tyree Daye, and Vanessa Angélica Villarreal; fiction writers Hernan Diaz, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, and Merritt Tierce; nonfiction writers Terese Marie Mailhot and Nadia Owusu; and dramatists Michael R. Jackson and Lauren Yee. (Poets & Writers)
In celebration of its eighty-fifth anniversary, the Academy of American Poets will launch four new awards honoring leadership shown by a poet, a publisher, a partner, and a patron. The inaugural awards will be presented to poet Sonia Sanchez, Andrews McMeel Publishing, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Academy’s former board of directors chair Eunice “Nicie” Panetta at the Poetry & the Creative Mind gala in New York City on April 24. (Publishers Weekly)
“I want to ask and explore questions in a way that either other people can’t do, because of my training and social location, or that they would never do, because of who they are.” Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom talks to Roxane Gay about taking her own authority seriously. (Guernica)
At the Atlantic, Tom Rosenstiel finds that while journalists may be heroes, they don’t make great protagonists in political fiction.
Aaron Shulman speaks to the Los Angeles Review of Books about his nonfiction debut, The Age of Disenchantments, and telling the story of the Panero family of 20th-century Spain, whose lives featured fascism, imprisonment, madness, and literary feuds. “That’s kind of a writer’s dream when it comes to narrative raw material. My job was just to not screw it up.”
“Those poems enact such extraordinary psychological processes of discovery and unfolding, and they’re never didactic; they’re always about the self in motion.” At the New Yorker Poetry Podcast, Peter Balakian reads and discusses the work of Theodore Roethke.
And in California, entries in the third annual UC Berkeley Edible Book Festival included dishes such as “The Communist Antipasto” and “Infinite Zest.” (Atlas Obscura)
