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:
Today is World Book and Copyright Day. Established in 1995 by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), World Book and Copyright Day recognizes the societal importance of books and promotes literacy worldwide. The date of April 23 is symbolic for world literature because it was on this date in 1616 that Miguel de Cervantes, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, and William Shakespeare all died.
Speaking of Shakespeare’s death, today also marks the Bard’s 451st birthday, and tributes and celebrations abound everywhere from his hometown of Stratford upon Avon, England, to New York City.
One hundred and fifty years ago this month, Walt Whitman first published his Civil War poetry collection Drum-Taps, and the collection was recently reissued by New York Review Books. At the Boston Globe, Richard Kreitner discusses Whitman’s lasting relevancy and how the reissue of Drum-Taps serves as a “timely reminder that Whitman was not so much reveling in the carnage of a country divided—a charge leveled at him in recent years—as hoping that, in his poetry, readers would find the moral resources for what needed to come next: national reconstruction, in the most profound sense.”
M. H. Abrams, the founding editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, has died at age 102. Abrams edited the first seven editions of the anthology. His critical histories of the Romantic Poets—The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition, and Natural Supernaturalism—shifted the academic study of Romanticism in the 1950s. (Guardian)
At the New York Times, Alexandra Alter profiles Gregory Pardlo, winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for his collection Digest. “Mr. Pardlo’s writing is often pointedly arcane, poking fun at the self-consciousness of academic and critical discourse….But he also writes intensely personal poems…and delivers funny and poignant dispatches from the front lines of gentrifying Brooklyn.”
This year’s Banned Books Week—a nationwide campaign aimed to raise awareness of book censorship—will focus on young adult books. In a statement yesterday, chair of the Banned Books Week National Committee Judith Platt said, “Young adult books are challenged more frequently than any other type of books.” Banned Books Week 2015 will take place September 27 through October 3.
“I’m very drawn to that imaginary time-traveling—projecting yourself into the past, and into a specific person’s experience of the past, through their physical environment and the actual clothes that they wore.” At the Atlantic, author and editor Kate Bolick talks about the experience of engaging with historical women she admired while writing her new book Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own.
