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:
British Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy has been made a Dame in Britain’s New Year’s Honors list. At the Guardian, Kate Wilkinson reflects on Duffy’s poetry as well as her political involvement in protesting Britain’s library closures and embargo on sending books to prisoners.
What are your New Year’s literary resolutions? Benjamin Samuel asks writers and editors what literary changes they are planning in 2015. (Electric Literature)
At the New York Times Bookends blog, authors Pankaj Mishra and Benjamin Moser debate whether writers can still, as Ezra Pound once directed, “Make it new.”
Successful essay collections from Roxane Gay, Eula Biss, Meghan Daum, and other women published this year prompts Sarah Weinman to suggest that 2014 is the “year of the female essayist.” (MacCleans)
Independent publisher Melville House has already sold out of its initial print run of fifty thousand copies of the Senate Torture Report, which went on sale only yesterday. (Publisher’s Weekly)
Louis Menand explores the interesting history of the mass-market paperback book in an essay for the New Yorker.
Browse the Boston Review’s top twenty poems of 2014.
“Despite being a supporter of higher education and having earned higher degrees myself, the real problem with contemporary literature (and literary scholarship) is that so much of it comes out of institutionalized culture.” At the Review Review, Rosemarie Dombrowski examines the exclusivity of academic Creative Writing programs.
