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:
Almost two hundred years since Percy Bysshe Shelley penned his famous sonnet “Ozymandias,” about a statue of Pharaoh Ramses II, archeologists have found an eight-meter statue of the pharaoh in a Cairo slum. The statue is estimated to be three thousand years old. (Guardian)
Spuyten Duyvil has released a 740-page anthology, Resist Much Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance, which brings together protest poetry written by more than 350 poets after the 2016 presidential election. Spuyten Duyvil will donate half of the proceeds to Planned Parenthood. (Bustle)
Isabel Allende will publish a new novel, In the Midst of Winter, with Simon & Schuster’s Atria Books imprint this fall. The novel follows the story of a human-rights scholar after he gets into a car crash with an undocumented Guatemalan immigrant in a snowstorm in Brooklyn.
Ron Charles looks back at the tumultuous twenty-five-year history of Oxford American, a quarterly magazine of Southern writing that “defies the regional label.” (Washington Post)
“Sometimes my loneliness can get so big I don’t even know what it is. I can’t quite grasp all the edges of my loneliness because it’s wide-ranging and it feels ignoble at times.” Poet Donika Kelly talks about loneliness, her obsession with naming, and what compelled her to start writing her debut collection, Bestiary. (Divedapper)
Brooklyn Magazine has released its annual list of “100 Most Influential People in Brooklyn Culture,” which includes short interviews with several writers, including poets Tina Chang, Gregory Pardlo, and Camille Rankine; and fiction writers Angela Flournoy, Tony Tulathimutte, and Jacqueline Woodson.
Author Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie has sparked outrage after stating in an interview last Friday with Channel 4 News that she doesn’t think the experience of a transgender woman can be equated with that of a cisgender woman. (Los Angeles Times)
Australian billionaire and mining tycoon Clive Palmer has been trying his hand at Twitter poetry, posting poems he says are inspired by his dieting. “Fried rice / Fried lice / It’s not nice / Don’t think twice / Have a vanilla slice.” (BBC News)
