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:
NBC News features a retrospective of Asian American literary achievements in 2016, including Viet Thanh Nguyen winning the Pulitzer Prize for his novel, The Sympathizer, and comic-book author Gene Luen Yang receiving a MacArthur “genius” grant.
“What poetry gives us is an archive, the fullest existent archive of what human beings have thought and felt by the kind of artists who loved language in a way that allowed them to labor over how you make a music of words to render experience exactly and fully.” Poet Robert Hass talks with Ecco publisher Daniel Halpern about the lasting significance of poetry. (New York Times)
An annotated edition of Adolf Hitler’s manifesto, Mein Kampf, has become a best-seller in Germany. Eighty-five thousand copies of the book have been sold since its publication a year ago. (CBS News)
The Virginia Board of Education is considering a proposal that would require local school boards and teachers to notify parents of “sexually explicit” reading assignments and provide replacement texts for those who ask for them. (Washington Post)
At Electric Literature, Roxane Gay discusses her new story collection, Difficult Women, released yesterday by Grove Press, as well as her forthcoming memoir, Hunger, due later this year.
The Millions has released its “great book preview” of approximately eighty fiction and nonfiction titles that will be published during the first half of 2017.
Poet and musician David Meltzer, whose work is most often associated with the Beat Generation and San Francisco Renaissance of the 1950s and 1960s, died this past Saturday at age seventy-nine. Meltzer published more than forty poetry books in his lifetime. (San Francisco Chronicle)
Adam Morgan, editor in chief of the Chicago Review of Books, explains his decision not to cover a single Simon & Schuster book in 2017, following news of the publisher’s deal with Milo Yiannopoulos. “To protect the victims of discrimination from its traumatic and sometimes deadly consequences, the literary community must stand against anyone—author or publisher—who peddles hate speech for profit.” (Guardian)
