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.
In a break with presidential library tradition, the proposed Obama Presidential Center won’t house a research library or the administration’s official presidential records; instead, thirty million pages of unclassified paper records will be digitized and made available online. Rather than being run by the National Archives and Record Administration, the nineteen-acre complex will be overseen by the Obama Foundation, a private nonprofit entity. (New York Times)
The New York Times presents a literary guide to award nominees in this year’s Oscars: To complement the themes of Alfonso Cuáron’s Roma, read Natalia Toledo’s collection The Black Flower and Other Zapotec Poems; for Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, the Times recommends Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s debut novel, We Cast a Shadow.
Or one could abandon the film finalists altogether: In Literary Hub’s third annual “Academy Awards for Books” Esmé Weijun Wang is nominated for Best Actress in a Leading Role (Female Literary Citizen), while eight poetry collections are up for the award for Best Sound Editing and Sound Mixing.
In further movie news, Universal Pictures has optioned the rights to the title story of Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s best-selling collection, Friday Black. Executive producer Adjei-Brenyah will adapt the script. (Deadline)
Random House imprint G.P. Putnam’s Sons has partnered with Mystery Writers of America to create the Sue Grafton Memorial Award, which will honor the best novel in a series featuring a female protagonist. The nominees for the inaugural award include Lisa Black for Perish and Sara Paretsky for Shell Game, with the winner announced at the Edgar Awards in New York on April 25—a day after what would have been Grafton’s seventy-ninth birthday. (Publishers Weekly).
Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America has announced the nominees for the annual Nebula Awards, which will be presented in Woodland Hills, California, on May 18. The finalists include novelists Mary Robinette Kowal for The Calculating Stars and Naomi Novik for Spinning Silver.
In Winchester, England, plans to erect a statue of Jane Austen in the grounds of the local cathedral have been scrapped after a “barrage” of local criticism. (Guardian)
At the New Yorker, Benjamin Hedin revisits Robert Penn Warren’s interviews with civil rights leaders, and Warren’s approach to the “white man’s ‘white-man’ problem.”
