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 2018 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced yesterday. The winners in letters include Frank Bidart’s poetry collection Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965–2016, Andrew Sean Greer’s novel Less, and Caroline Fraser’s biography Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder.
Two acclaimed novels, Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, are being adapted into plays. Both plays will premiere in London—White Teeth at the Kiln Theater on October 26 and The Remains of the Day at the Royal & Derngate Theater in February 2019. (New York Times)
On January 1, 2019, a year’s worth of copyrighted works will enter the public domain for the first time in twenty years. (Lifehacker)
Poet, translator, and Copper Canyon Press cofounder Sam Hamill has died at age seventy-four. Hamill received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and won the Stanley Lindberg Lifetime Achievement Award for Editing and the Washington Poets Association Lifetime Achievement Award. (Poetry Foundation)
W. W. Norton & Company has launched its first children’s imprint, Norton Young Readers. Simon Boughton, previously the senior vice president and publishing director of Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group, will be the publishing director of the new imprint. (Publishers Weekly)
Susan Orlean, best-selling author of the novel The Orchid Thief is working on a new nonfiction book titled The Library Book, which will be “an account of the most devastating library fire in American history that doubles as a true love letter to one of our most prized institutions.” (Entertainment Weekly)
“Traps… / don’t set themselves, / set in motion from elementary to penitentiary / we’ve been taught to defend ourselves and a dollar.” Poet Eduardo Martinez, a prisoner serving a life sentence at Dade Correctional Institution in Florida, discusses his poem, “we beez in deez trap,” for PBS NewsHour.
