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:
Tomorrow, celebrate the one hundred fiftieth birthday of poet and Nobel laureate William Butler Yeats with a sampler of his poems and a quiz, and reflect on his legacy in the rural town of Galway, Ireland. Or, take part in the many events planned for Yeats Day 2015. (Poetry Foundation, Guardian, NPR)
Durga Chew-Bose, Jazmine Hughes, Vijith Assar, and Buster Bylander have launched writersofcolor.org, a new website aimed to “create more visibility for writers of color, ease their access to publications, and build a platform that is both easy for editors to use and accurately represents the writers.”
A pop-up exhibit honoring late Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Philip Levine is currently on display at the New York Public Library. The exhibit, which runs through June 25, features papers from Levine’s archives as well as texts that influenced the poet, including a first edition copy of Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. (GalleyCat)
Diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, Jenny Diski continues to write personal essays. “What binds together the disparate elements of her genre-confounding work—part memoir, part travelogue, part criticism, part rant—is the force of Diski’s peculiar personality,” Giles Harvey notes. “Even now, crouching beneath extinction’s alp, she remains tenaciously, incorrigibly herself.” (New York Times)
Heather Treseler writes for the Weekly Standard about poet Elizabeth Bishop’s “fastidious perfectionism,” the importance of place in the poet’s life and work, and Colm Tóibín’s new book, On Elizabeth Bishop.
Two recent book-art auctions for American Booksellers for Free Expression, held in conjunction with BookExpo America, raised nearly $60,000. The money will fund two literary nonprofits that defend children’s free speech rights: Banned Books Week and the Kids Right to Read Project. (Shelf Awareness)
At Publishers Weekly, novelist Ann Roiphe discusses what she has learned over her fifty-year literary career. “After fifty years of work I see less melodrama and more of the quiet pleasure of the thing, the sweet moment of finding the right word, or the turn of plot, or the idea that opens the next idea.”
