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:
The Whiting Foundation has launched an award program for nonprofit literary magazines to “acknowledge, reward, and encourage organizations that are actively nurturing the writers who tell us, through their art, what is important.” The foundation will award a total of $120,000 to medium-sized and smaller print magazines as well as online magazines. Applications are open through December 15.
Speaking of awards, Kirkus Reviews has announced the finalists for its $50,000 annual awards in fiction, nonfiction, and young readers’ literature.
Meanwhile, Brooklyn’s Honey & Wax Booksellers has announced the winners of its book-collecting prize for women under thirty. Jessica Kahan won the $1,000 first-place prize for her collection of more than three hundred romance novels from the Jazz Age and Depression Era. (Paris Review)
“The answer is NO, you are not too old and will never be too old.” Elisa Gabbert dishes out writing advice to a writer who fears she’s too old to succeed in the literary world. (Electric Literature)
“Are there new institutional havens out there to which today’s poets (and critics) can turn? Can the market, or civil society, sustain the kind of professionalized poetic activity that has been supported by the academy and other institutions for the past sixty years?” Evan Kindley considers the American poetry world’s financial reliance on academia. (Chronicle of Higher Education)
Google has added a new search feature that allows users to find local libraries that carry e-book copies of a book. (Book Riot)
“Your book is your book until it isn’t…. Once the book is out in the world, it exists for readers, not you. The book becomes a thing, a little planet with its own gravitational pull, its own blurry ecosystem.” Poet Annie Kim talks with fellow poet Jayne Benjulian about working on a poetry manuscript and what happens after publication. (Review Review)
Maddie Crum investigates the similarities between Eileen Myles’s Instagram account and her new memoir, Afterglow, both of which “aim to catalog life in gritty, naturalistic stills that, when amassed over time, form a lyrical whole, like a good grunge song.” (Los Angeles Review of Books)
