Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—publishing reports, literary dispatches, academic announcements, and more—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today’s stories.
At the Believer, Celina Su shares reported poems about how low-income residents in New York City’s Chinatown “attempt to maintain some personal space and dignity.” The piece, which also features photographs by Annie Ling, was created with the support of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
Eavan Boland, an Irish poet and the director of the creative writing program at Stanford, died on Monday at age seventy-five after suffering a stroke. Michael D. Higgins, the president of Ireland, remembers Boland as “one of the preeminent voices in Irish literature.” (Irish Times)
Megan Milks profiles Bruce Boone, a leading figure of the New Narrative movement, which “blends diaristic writing about friends, sex, and gossip with theory and pop culture.” Milks explores Boone’s hesitance to publish in commercial forms and celebrates his commitment to community. (Poetry Foundation)
Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the Center for the Art of Translation, home to Two Lines Press, has pledged to direct 50 percent of donations from its spring fundraising campaign to the Book Industry Charitable Foundation. “Without our independent bookstore partners, many books in translation would never find an audience,” writes executive director Michael Holtmann.
Thea Lim revisits her 2018 novel, An Ocean of Minutes, and reflects on how her fictional pandemic differs from the coronavirus crisis. “I couldn’t conceive that no big drama is needed to render working people choiceless. All that has to happen is for commerce to stop, for four, five, six days.” (Guernica)
At the Evergreen Review, Allison Grimaldi Donahue shares a dispatch from Bologna under lockdown. “The discourse of power does not want to admit that there are events in the world for which none of us is prepared and that perhaps we have been doing it wrong. All of us.”
Per Olov Enquist, a Swedish writer whose work was translated into more than twenty languages, died on Saturday at age eighty-five. (Washington Post)
Jake Nevins considers recent works of gay fiction by Garth Greenwell, Brandon Taylor, and Peter Kispert, among others, and the authors’ common interest in themes of concealment and deception. (New York Times)
And the Daily Shout-Out goes to Michael Chabon for his children’s literature readings on Instagram. In his most recent video dispatch, he features Stellaluna by Janell Cannon.
