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:
A literary center dedicated to the memory of late novelist Pay Conroy is set to open this fall in Beaufort, South Carolina, where the best-selling author lived. The Pat Conroy Literary Center intends to “create a welcoming gathering place for events, workshops, and classes to nurture and inspire writers and readers, young and old.” Donations to the center can be made here. Conroy died in March. (Shelf Awareness)
To celebrate LGBTQ Pride Month, the Huffington Post features a list of eleven groundbreaking LGBTQ-centric novels, including Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, and David Ebershoff’s best-seller, The Danish Girl.
Max Porter, author of the acclaimed debut novel Grief Is the Thing With Feathers, talks about the process of writing the book and how its form reflects the inherent fragmentary quality of grief: “Fragmentary seemed the truest way of getting at what I wanted to get at…. That switch from lush sentimentality to crushing domestic drudgery; from unfathomably deep depression to the wicked resilience of kid’s humor, those are the switches that the fragmentary form allowed that seemed to me to be truthful and recognizable, and possibly generative.” (Electric Literature)
At Entropy, fiction writers Kathy Fish and Robert Vaughan discuss the creation of their collaborative story collection, Rift, as well as their affinity for flash fiction.
In Amazon global domination news, the company is set to invest an additional $3 billion in India, which raises its investment in the country to more than $5 billion. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said the company would open a Web Services Cloud Region in India this year, making the country home to the firm’s “largest software engineering and development center outside of the United States.” (Reuters)
Carla Hayden, the librarian who President Obama nominated to be the next Librarian of Congress, is close to securing the appointment; if she wins a majority of the Senate vote—which should be scheduled soon—Hayden would be the first woman and first African American Librarian of Congress. American Library Association president Sari Feldman said the confirmation of Hayden’s appointment would be historic, as Hayden would transform the Library of Congress “into the social and cultural engine of progress and democracy for all Americans that it was meant to be.”(Publishers Weekly)
In Ernest Hemingway’s letters and biographies, Pauline Hemingway, his second wife, has been vilified as a predator and homewrecker. At Vogue, author Lesley M. M. Blume complicates that view by sharing previously unknown details about Pauline’s life as a writer and reporter, which Blume discovered through research for her nonfiction book, Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises, which was released Tuesday by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
