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:
Earlier this week, controversy erupted in the poetry community when it was revealed that a poem included in the 2015 Best American Poetry anthology under the name Yi-Fen Chou is a pseudonym for Michael Derrick Hudson, a white poet. It has now been revealed that the name Yi-Fen Chou is actually that of a real person who attended the same high school as Hudson in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The family of Chou has come forward and demanded that Hudson stop using the name. Meanwhile, the literary community examines past instances of writers pretending to be Asian, and the ethical challenges editors face when trying to publish a diverse journal or anthology. (New York Times, Huffington Post, New Yorker, Rumpus)
It would be a “gargantuan” error to think that “quixotic” is the only word in colloquial speech that is derived from a literary character. NPR’s Robert Siegel talks to University of Michigan American culture professor Bruce Conforth about various words we use today that originate from the names of famous characters in literature.
Yesterday, the Academy of American Poets announced the recipients of the 2015 Academy of American Poets Prizes, including Joy Harjo, who is the recipient of the annual $100,000 Wallace Stevens Award. Read more about the prizes and this year’s winners at the G&A Blog.
At the London Review of Books, Robert Hanks examines the nature of the beast that plagues him and many writers: procrastination. “One explanation, or characterization, of procrastination is that you fail to identify sufficiently with your future self…. It’s true that a certain anxiety about identity goes with writing: is that how I sound? Is that what I think? Is that who I am? Or perhaps we indulge in the irrational, the self-harming, because we want to harm ourselves and we crave irrationality—it’s self-flagellation, or resistance to a reason or reasons we find oppressive.”
The Wall Street Journal profiles Catapult, a new independent publishing company founded by Elizabeth Koch and Electric Literature cofounder Andy Hunter. Catapult released its first title—Padgett Powell’s story collection Cries for Help, Various—on Tuesday, and will launch its website on September 14.
After more than six years of publication, the quarterly online literary journal Wag’s Revue has announced its closure, along with the publication of its final issue. Issue 20 includes an interview with poet and BuzzFeed literary editor Saeed Jones, and new poems by Geoffrey Nutter and Meg Ronan.
In the 1930s, Ernest Hemingway caught a twelve-foot-long blue marlin off the Bahamian coast. That taxidermied marlin currently hangs at the L. C. Bates Museum in Hinckley, Maine, where visitors can watch the process of its repair this fall. In other news about Hemingway and fishing: On September 25, the author’s journals and letters detailing his fishing exploits will be displayed in a show at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City. (New York Times)
