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:
At the Los Angeles Review of Books, authors including Rigoberto González, Sandra Cisneros, and Eduardo C. Corral share their personal reflections on Juan Felipe Herrera’s appointment as the United States poet laureate.
Literary nonprofit VIDA: Women in Literary Arts announced today that the organization’s founders, Erin Belieu, Cate Marvin, and Ann Townsend, will transition from daily leadership operations to VIDA’s Advisory Board. Executive Committee members Melissa Febos, Amy King, Lynn Melnick, Camille Rankine, and Carmen Giménez Smith will continue daily operations and work to carry out VIDA’s mission to “increase critical attention to contemporary women’s writing as well as further transparency around gender equality issues in contemporary literary culture.”
Controversy surrounding the upcoming release of Harper Lee’s novel Go Set a Watchman continues to grow, as new evidence suggests the manuscript was discovered years earlier than previously thought. (New York Times)
Meanwhile, in advance of the publication of Lee’s novel, M. O. Walsh explores the reasons for southern gothic literature’s widespread appeal, likening it to a trusty bicycle. (Guardian)
According to Rebecca Eaton, the executive producer of the long-running PBS program Masterpiece, American literature is too dark for PBS. Eaton discusses the various reasons that Masterpiece has produced fewer shows adapted from American novels than from British literature in its forty-year history, one being that “the Brits tended to write more colorful stories rather than the darkness and struggle.” (Atlantic)
British musician P. J. Harvey will publish her first poetry collection, The Hollow of the Hand (Bloomsbury), in October. Harvey collaborated with filmmaker and photographer Seamus Murphy on the book, which chronicles the pair’s world travels over the last few years. (Bookseller)
Author Douglas Penick talks about the joys of discovering contemporary micro presses around the world that are producing “compelling, imaginative fiction that is unknown to major reviewers and beyond the current academic canons.” (Publishers Weekly)
