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:
The Handmaid’s Tale craze continues: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will release a newly designed hardcover issue of the dystopian novel on April 25, one day before the Hulu adaptation of the book will air. Yesterday Hulu released a full-length trailer of the series, which stars Elisabeth Moss. (Publishers Weekly, Rolling Stone)
Vintage Books will publish the entirety of Timothy Snyder’s book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, on twenty posters that will be affixed to an east London street next week. The posters, each of which will contain one chapter of the book, are designed to mimic 1930s propaganda; Snyder is an expert on European history and the Holocaust, and his book offers both a history of tyranny and ways to resist. (Guardian)
Poet Joanne Kyger has died at age eighty-two. Kyger was a leading poet in the San Francisco Renaissance and wrote more than twenty poetry collections. (SF Gate)
“Even on Twitter, Trump’s anxiety about the written language sometimes bubbles to the surface.” Linguist Geoffrey Nunberg considers the president’s written language and his use of scare quotes. (New Republic)
The Cleveland Foundation has announced the winners of the Anisfield-Wolf Awards, given for books that confront racism and celebrate diversity. The winners are Tyehimba Jess, Peter Ho Davies, Karan Mahajan, Margot Lee Shetterly, and Isabel Allende.
“You are not saying no to that person who might be disappointed in you, you are saying yes to a life in which you are not in bondage to the fear of other people’s disappointment.” Melissa Febos offers some tips for writers, especially women, on how to prioritize their art and resist the pressure to please others. (Catapult)
Critic David Orr revisits the questions of whether songwriting should be considered poetry, what we mean when we call “anything from a blancmange to a shovel pass ‘poetry,’” and what makes poetry poetry. (New York Times)
Coca-Cola has finally caught wind of Frank O’Hara and posted a blog about the New York School poet and his poem “Having a Coke With You.” (Locus Solus)
