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:
Michelle Obama will publish her memoir, Becoming, with Penguin Random House in November. “Writing Becoming has been a deeply personal experience,” she wrote in a tweet. “I talk about my roots and how a girl from the South Side found her voice.” Michelle and Barack Obama signed a book deal reported to be more than $60 million with the publisher in March. (CNN)
The cast of the upcoming Broadway revival of Mart Crowley’s classic gay play, The Boys in the Band, reads poems written by the “fast-expanding galaxy of talented queer poets,” including Richie Hofmann, Ocean Vuong, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, and Saeed Jones. (T Magazine)
Each year nine hundred graduating medical students in Scotland receive a copy of the pocket-sized poetry book Tools of the Trade, which includes poems to help young doctors cope with the stress of the job. (Wall Street Journal)
Poet Jordan Davis has rebooted the Napkin, a Twitter-only publication that features sketches, stories, doodles, and poetry written on napkins. (Atlas Obscura)
After the success of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, Stephen Rubin, the president and publisher of Henry Holt & Company, has made a comeback after “some in the industry speculated that his once-powerful career was all but over.” (New York Times)
Li-Young Lee talks with NPR about the demands of poetry, his family history, and his most recent collection, The Undressing, which came out last week.
At KQED, poets Sam Sax and Tenaya Nasser-Frederick reread Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” in light of the shooting last week at Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida.
“In the poetry of immigrants, nostalgia is as common as confetti at parades or platitudes at political conventions. My nostalgia was simply the clear bottle in which I stored my explosive rage.” Amitava Kumar describes immigrating to the United States from India and writing about the country of his birth. (New Yorker)
