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.
At the Frankfurt Book Fair, Karl Ove Knausgaard spoke in praise of the “slowness” of literature. “I’m not thinking of how long it takes to read a book but of how long its effects can be felt...” (New Yorker)
The Cincinnati Review shares some of their internal reader reports, offering a window into the magazine’s editorial process.
At the Los Angeles Review of Books, David Whyte discusses the push-pull between the desires to create and run from intimacy, and how the best poetry lives somewhere in between. He argues that poetry can reflect the simultaneous truths that “you are irretrievably alone, and you also belong to others and to the world...”
Reginald Dwayne Betts talks to Rachel Eliza Griffiths about his new poetry collection, Felon. He discusses bringing multiple histories to the page; his identities as a lawyer, poet, father, and son; and his experience of incarceration. (Paris Review Daily)
“It was perfect for me. I felt I could be my whole self, which at that point was queer, feminist, punk and working-class.” Michelle Tea reflects on finding home(s), queer family, and claiming her experiences through autobiographical writing. (Guardian)
Xu Xi talks to the Rumpus about her latest book, This Fish Is Fowl: Essays of Being, and celebrating transnational identity.
On Tuesday, Ernest J. Gaines died at age eighty-six at home in Louisiana. Gaines was the author of eight novels and the recipient of numerous awards including a Guggenheim fellowship and a MacArthur “Genius” grant. His work centered the lives of African Americans in the South from the time of slavery to the civil rights era and beyond. (NPR)
Stephen Dixon, a prolific experimental fiction writer, has died at age eighty-three. The author of more than thirty books, Dixon was known for his immersive style. “One doesn’t exactly read a story by Stephen Dixon; one submits to it,” wrote Alan H. Friedman in a review of Dixon’s novel Frog. (Washington Post)
