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.
Writer and editor Roxane Gay is teaming up with Grove Atlantic to launch her own eponymous imprint, which will champion authors from underrepresented groups writing fiction, nonfiction, and memoir. Gay will work closely with Grove executive editor Amy Hundley, who has edited Gay’s own books, to produce three titles per year. (New York Times)
Since it staged a coup in February, the Myanmar military has imprisoned more than thirty poets, and four poets who protested against the military have been killed. “The people with weapons are afraid of pen-wielding hands,” says U Yee Mon, a poet and one of the ousted government officials. (New York Times)
Elinam Agbo and Cristina Correa will join the Kenyon Review as the 2021–2023 fellows in prose and poetry, respectively. The fellowship program is a full-time commitment. Each writer receives a yearly stipend and is expected to “undertake a significant writing project,” while also assisting with editorial projects at the journal and teaching one class per semester at Kenyon College.
Yesterday afternoon at the U.S. Book Show, Eso Won Books in Los Angeles was named Publishers Weekly’s Bookstore of the Year. Meanwhile, Toi Crockett of Simon & Schuster earned the distinction of Sales Rep of the Year.
“The more I looked at Munro’s queer men, the more I saw their links to the old women who populate her fiction. Both groups catch her eye as outsiders.” B. Pietras considers Alice Munro’s treatment of queer characters, searching for answers about how his late grandmother, of the same generation as Munro, might have felt about queerness. (Literary Hub)
Justin Nash has won the Sophie Kerr Prize, which is awarded to a graduating senior at Washington College who shows great literary promise. This year the prize includes a purse of $65,580, preserving its claim to fame as the most valuable undergraduate literary prize in the country. (Associated Press)
“I want to shock the reader—but not with cliched twists that are unrealistically over-the-top or exploitatively lurid. I want to shock them with reality.” Jonathan Parks-Ramage recommends “queer books with heart-stopping twists” that informed the writing of his debut novel, Yes, Daddy. (Electric Literature)
Vulture recommends thirty-five books forthcoming this summer, including new titles from Alexandra Kleeman, Kristen Radtke, and Brandon Taylor.
