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:
Last month, the newly elected mayor of Venice, Italy, removed approximately fifty children’s books from the city’s schools that depicted same-sex families. In response to the ban, more than two hundred fifty Italian authors signed a letter asking the mayor to ban their books as well. “We don’t want to stay in a city where the books of others are banned,” the letter states. (Guardian)
At the New Yorker, Neima Jahromi profiles the work of Iranian modernist poet Sohrab Sepehri and examines the political role of poetry in the Middle Eastern country’s turbulent history.
A recently published collection of correspondence between Beat poet Allen Ginsberg and poet and City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti documents their forty-year friendship and dynamic careers. Read a sampling of letters from the collection, I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career (City Lights), at the Poetry Foundation.
“Forgive me,” but it’s hard to deny the temptation for parody and replication of William Carlos Williams’s 1955 poem “This is Just to Say.” Annie Lowrey examines Williams’s poem-turned-meme in the Twitter world. (New York Magazine)
Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Tracy K. Smith has been named the new director of Princeton University’s Program in Creative Writing. Smith succeeds poet and National Book Award finalist Susan Wheeler, who has led the seventy-five-year-old program since 2011.
The highly anticipated second novel by Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman, broke sales records at Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million on its first day published. Both retailers announced that Watchman had the largest first-day sale of any adult fiction book in history. (Publishers Weekly)
“Sometimes our stabs at relevance encourage a sort of impatience with the familiar, the tried-and-true.” Authors Siddartha Deb and Anna Holmes discuss the consequences, both positive and negative, of our cultural obsession with and search for newness. (New York Times)
