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.
The Poetry Foundation has selected twenty-two finalists for its 2020 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships, which are awarded to young poets in order to “encourage the further study and writing of poetry.” In keeping with the organization’s recent commitment to reexamine its various internal structures and practices, the foundation also announced that this year’s fellowship winners will be chosen by a broader team of staff from across the foundation, in lieu of being selected exclusively by a small group from the Poetry editorial team. The recipients of the five $25,800 fellowships will be announced in September.
Bookseller and political refugee Lam Wing-kee has reopened his formerly Hong Kong–based independent bookstore, Causeway Bay Books, in Taipei. Featuring a broad selection of titles that are banned in mainland China, the store was described by one customer as “a lighthouse of a free society.” (New York Times)
“Don’t ask the city who killed it. Those who killed it were those who rule it. Beirut knows this, and all of you know it.” Lebanese writer Elias Khoury responds to the recent explosion in Beirut. (Paris Review Daily)
The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books has announced that this year’s programming will take place exclusively online. Earlier this year, the festival was postponed from April to October in an attempt to dodge the pandemic. (Los Angeles Times)
“The language that Black and brown bodies somehow are contagious is never very far away.” Hazel Carby shares a selection of the archival images and documents that she used to write Imperial Intimacies, which explores both her Welsh and Jamaican ancestries. (Guernica)
Librarian Clarissa Cooke has discovered new books by researching the archives of her favorite literary awards. (New York Public Library)
Publishers Weekly highlights new nonfiction series at Europa Editions, Transit Books, and Deep Vellum Books.
Bethanne Patrick recommends five new works of literature in translation. (Literary Hub)
