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 announced the six recipients of its annual $40,000 nonfiction grants.
In other award news, Kirkus Reviews has announced the eighteen finalists for its $50,000 annual prizes, given for books of fiction, nonfiction, and young adult literature published during the previous year.
OlaRonke Akinmowo shares why she started the Free Black Women’s Library, a mobile and interactive library of more than a thousand books written by Black women. (Hyperallergic)
“The point, she’s saying, is to last, to make love a habit, a collaboration that regenerates itself by doing, by staying together beyond the highs and lows of new passions or old regrets.” Hilton Als on Tracy K. Smith’s poetry. (New Yorker)
Leslie Jamison describes spending a summer in Wales writing a budget travel guide. (New York Times Magazine)
A collection of 180 letters from Hunter S. Thompson to his childhood friend Paul Semonin will be put up for auction on Thursday with an opening price of $110,000. (Guardian)
B. D. McClay offers an appreciation of fiction’s secondary characters. (Commonweal Magazine)
Veteran and journalist Elliot Ackerman talks about the “emotional transference” in art and his new novel, Waiting for Eden. (NPR)
