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:
“What’s written first in privacy reverberates beyond the walls it’s housed in. What’s worded in privacy changes the world, and sometimes, for that to happen, an interval-time of hiddenness is one of the soul’s requirements. We live in an outward-facing time. But not everything can happen on YouTube. Some poetry, at least, must continue to preserve the interiority that allows the heart and mind its more tentative, and more tender, experiments.” At Divedapper, Kaveh Akbar interviews poet Jane Hirshfield.
Hungarian Nobel laureate Imre Kertész has died at the age of 86. Kertész wrote several semi-autobiographical novels including Fateless, about his experiences as a prisoner at Auschwitz during the Holocaust. (Washington Post)
“It isn’t so much, then, that I grew into these writers as that I let their complex and sophisticated use of language reduce me to a child who had to learn to read all over again.” At the New York Times, critics Dana Stevens and Liesl Schillinger discuss the experience of growing to enjoy the work of writers they initially didn’t appreciate.
The National Book Foundation has announced the judges for its 2016 book awards. Joy Harjo will chair the judging panel for the poetry award, James English and Karen Joy Fowler will chair the fiction award, and Melissa Harris-Perry will chair the nonfiction award.
The annual Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference kicked off yesterday in Los Angeles; approximately eleven thousand people registered to attend. (Publishers Weekly)
Lydia Kiesling has been named the new editor of the Millions. She replaces founding editor C. Max Magee, who stated he is moving on to “open the door for something new.”
National Poetry Month starts today. The Academy of American Poets rounds up poetry events across the country and thirty ways to celebrate poetry.
Speaking of National Poetry Month, the Boston Review will publish a poem a day for the month of April, as well as additional poetry-related content including Karen Lepri’s interview with poet Dawn Lundy Martin.
