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:
In response to the release of a video in which Breitbart editor and conservative commentator Milo Yiannopoulos appears to condone pedophilia, Simon & Schuster has canceled the publication of his book, “Dangerous.” The publisher received significant criticism since announcing the $250,000 book deal last December. (Publishers Weekly)
“My protest stands. Simon & Schuster should have never enabled Milo in the first place.” Writer Roxane Gay responds to Simon & Schuster’s decision to pull Yiannopoulos’s book. Gay canceled her own book deal with the publisher in January in protest of the Breitbart editor’s book deal.
Zachary Turpin, a graduate student at the University of Houston, has uncovered a lost serial novel by Walt Whitman. Published anonymously by the poet in 1852, the 36,000-word mystery novel “Life and Adventures of Jack Engle”—a “quasi-Dickensian tale of an orphan’s adventures”—will be published by the University of Iowa Press and online at the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. (New York Times)
Electric Literature rounds up thirty-four books by women of color to read this year, including titles by Han Kang, Shanthi Sekaran, Pola Oloixarac, Valeria Luiselli, and Durga Chew-Bose.
PEN America has announced that the 2017 World Voices Festival of International Literature, which will be held in May in New York City, will focus on gender and power in a year that “risks instead becoming a time of retrenchment on rights.” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Carrie Brownstein, Athena Farrokhzad, and Patti Smith are among the 150 speakers slated to appear.
“Love Spanglish. Love caló. Love slang. Love our barrio terminology. Take pride.” Poet Verónica Reyes talks about lessons she has learned as a Chicana poet growing up in East Los Angeles. (Letras Latinas)
In an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, Dana Gioia, a former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, makes a case for protecting the endowment, and clarifies what it funds.
Tom Hanks will publish his debut story collection, Uncommon Type: Some Stories, with Knopf in October. The collection’s seventeen stories all have something to do with typewriters, which the actor collects. (Entertainment Weekly)
