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 finalists for the 2019 PEN America Literary Awards have been announced. The nominees for the $75,000 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award are Ada Limón for The Carrying, José Olivarez for Citizen Illegal, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah for Friday Black, Richard Powers for The Overstory, and Tara Westover for Educated.
Meanwhile, United States Artists has announced its 2019 fellowships, which offer grants of $50,000 each to forty-five artists across disciplines. This year’s fellows include poets Tarfia Faizullah and Rebecca Gayle Howell and fiction writer Lesley Nneka Arimah.
More than five thousand books from John Ashbery’s personal collection are now available to scholars as part of Harvard University’s Houghton Library. The donation, made by Ashbery’s husband David Kermani, includes annotated editions of books by Boris Pasternak and Franz Kafka; a copy of the Oxford Book of American Verse, bookmarked with pressed flowers; and one of the late poet’s writing desks. (New York Times)
Another desk, and a forgotten note left in its drawer, may confirm the disputed identity of a young girl slightly smiling in a 1788 portrait: a twelve-year-old Jane Austen. (Guardian)
In the wake of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s divorce announcement, Katy Waldman considers the relationships depicted in his wife’s novels. “A confirmation bias is at work, and the belief to be confirmed is that a book by MacKenzie Bezos—one half of the richest couple in the world, partner to a man who has exploded paradigms of retail, labor, even capitalism itself, and upended the very industry that publishes her books—just has to be a roman à clef.” (New Yorker)
In Los Angeles, genre fans have rallied in support of Dark Delicacies bookstore, pledging over $20,000 to a GoFundMe campaign to help the mom-and-pop horror shop relocate after twenty-five years. (Los Angeles Times)
At the Paris Review, Michael Chabon advises against skipping over an introduction. “They unstopper the vial that contains, like some volatile oil, the fragrance of the time in which the prefaced work was engendered, conceived, or written, summoning for writer and reader alike a sensuous jolt of things past.”
“In the same way that a typewriter influenced O’Hara’s lines and the speed at which thinking in O’Hara’s poems happens, I think we’re beginning to see what’s possible both textually and image-wise in terms of the screen shot—there’s no limit to what we’re about to see happen in the lyric landscape.” Poet sam sax discusses Jewish storytelling, queer storytelling, and how poetry can respond to tragedy. (Los Angeles Review of Books)
