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:
To celebrate International Women’s Day, Words Without Borders highlights women writers and translators around the world who are “pressing for progress” through their activism and their writing.
Today the New York Times launched Overlooked, a project chronicling the lives of influential women who were left out of the Times’s obituaries since 1851. The first installment includes obituaries for fifteen women, including novelist Charlotte Brontë, and poets Sylvia Plath and Qui Jin.
Meanwhile, Elif Batuman, Jennifer Egan, Arundhati Roy, and Jesmyn Ward are among the sixteen semifinalists for the 2018 Women’s Prize for Fiction. The annual prize of £30,000 is given for a book of fiction and is open to women writers anywhere in the world.
Penguin Books has joined the International Women’s Day celebration by opening the Like a Woman pop-up bookstore in London, which only stocks books written by women. (Mashable)
Award-winning poet and teacher Lucie Brock-Broido died yesterday at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was sixty-one. Brock-Broido was the author of four poetry collections, most recently Stay, Illusion (Knopf, 2013), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. (Washington Post)
U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith has been named the new chair of Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts. The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet succeeds theater scholar Michael Cadden, who has served as chair since 2012.
