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:
For Valentine’s Day, check out love letters written by Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, and Ernest Hemingway, among other writers. Or browse through ten “unconventional” new books about love, including Tayari Jones’s An American Marriage and Chloe Benjamin’s The Immortalists. Or accompany Jia Tolentino through her year of reading books about love. (Bustle, W Magazine, New Yorker)
For more literary love, the Conversation tells the story of Mark Twain’s courtship and marriage to Olivia Langdon, who helped Twain write several of his books.
Karl Ove Knausgaard chronicles his literary road trip through Russia, from Ivan Turgenev’s estate to Kazan and Yekaterinburg. (New York Times)
The children’s publishing industry is dealing with issues of sexual abuse and harassment following an article published by Anne Ursu, who reported on a survey she opened about sexual harassment in December. Two writers, Jay Asher and David Díaz, were accused of sexual misconduct in the response to Ursu’s piece, and they have both since left the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. (Publishers Weekly, Medium)
In response to the Trump administration’s renewed proposal to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), advocacy network LitNet has launched a call to action to save the NEA. Poets & Writers is among the fifty literary organizations that make up LitNet.
From last year’s May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, nine writers share how receiving an NEA fellowship changed their lives.
Debut novelist Hermoine Hoby talks about imposter syndrome, double standards towards male and female creativity, and learning how to cope with the public response to her book, Neon in Daylight. (Creative Independent)
“Post-Trump and post-#metoo, where digital culture has both exposed and produced polarizing inequalities, can Lorde’s vocabulary of self-preservation help us reconnect with our bodies as a political weapon?” Phoebe Cripps considers the modern political relevance of Audre Lorde’s poetry. (Frieze)
A Harvard University professor is offering a graduate course that focuses on feces and French literature entitled “Cacophonies: Toward an Excremental Poetics.” (Fox News)
