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Every day the editors of Poets & Writers Magazine scan the headlines—publishing reports, literary dispatches, academic announcements, and more—for all the news that creative writers need to know.
The Poetry Foundation has announced the schedule for ECOS, a three-day festival celebrating Latine poetry in Chicago from September 26-28. The literary events will be free and bilingual, presented with the North River Commission (Albany Park), the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture (Humboldt Park), and the National Museum of Mexican Art (Pilsen). ECOS takes its name from the Spanish word for echoes and commemorates Chicago’s history of cultivating Latine poetry.
In a 120-year retrospective on the New York City subway as literary muse, the New York Times highlights archival photographs and literary quotes from authors such as Sylvia Plath, James Baldwin, Edith Wharton, and Ralph Ellison.
Six major publishers, the Authors Guild, and several best-selling authors have teamed up with students and parents in Florida to file a federal lawsuit challenging the state's new book banning law, Publishers Weekly reports. The complaint, which states that the law challenges the First Amendment, specifically takes issue with two parts of the law: one that broadly prohibits books in public schools that contain any content that “describes sexual conduct,” and another that bans books that contain allegedly “pornographic” content “without consideration of the book as a whole, as the Supreme Court requires.”
In an interview with Electric Literature, author Samuel Kọ́láwọlé discusses his novel, The Road to the Salt Sea, and the validity of depicting violence on the page. “Art does not exist in a vacuum, and artists live in a real world where people are confronted daily with violence and its consequences,” he says. “Since violence is part of our collective experience and consciousness, shouldn’t it also be part of our art?”
The National Children’s Book and Literacy Alliance (NCBLA) is spearheading a new project called Empowering Young Writers, Publishers Weekly reports. The series of slideshows and educational resources, collected from over 500 children’s books, illustrate various writing elements and techniques for students in fourth to ninth grade. The online tools are available for free, and designed to support teachers, librarians, and parents.
Bookshop.org has launched a new buy-back scheme called Bookloop for secondhand books that allows customers to trade in books they own for credit on the retail website, The Guardian reports. Books traded via Bookshop.org will not be sold on Amazon-owned websites, and royalties gained will be distributed to authors via a shared author fund through the Society of Authors and the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society.
Stanford University recently laid off twenty-three lecturers in their creative writing department in one Zoom meeting, Inside Higher Ed reports. The deans who relayed the news said that the decision came from senior professors of creative writing. In an official statement, Stanford said that the original Jones fellowships were intended to be “limited, fixed-year teaching appointments,” but that the department has changed since the fellowship’s inception in the 1940s. Tom Kealey, a lecturer who has taught at the University for two decades, said the program grew from offering 20 or 25 classes to over 120 classes in the last fifteen years. The lecturers advocated for raises, which they were granted, in September 2023.
Percival Everett’s James, a reworking of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from Jim's perspective, is among the finalists in fiction for the 11th annual Kirkus Prize, the Associated Press reports. Other nominated titles include new novels by Richard Powers and Louise Erdrich; nonfiction works on abortion rights, the Iraq War, and the space shuttle Challenger tragedy; and a picture book by Jason Reynolds. Winners in each category, to be announced on October 16 at a ceremony in Manhattan, will receive $50,000.
Ann Regan, editor in chief of the Minnesota Historical Society Press, is retiring on September 3 after a 46-year career, Publishers Weekly reports. When asked why she stayed at the book publishing division of the Minnesota Historical Society for her entire career, she said, “Working in regional publishing is deeply satisfying. I go home every day knowing more about the place where I live.”
Leonard Riggio, who transformed book retail and publishing by building Barnes & Noble, has died at age 83 “following a valiant battle with Alzheimer’s disease,” the Associated Press reports. In 1971 Riggio purchased Barnes & Noble’s name and the company’s flagship store on lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. By the end of the 1990s, an estimated one of every eight books sold in the U.S. were purchased through the chain. By the early 2010s, however, Amazon had overtaken Barnes & Noble, and by the time Riggio retired in 2019, independent booksellers regarded the chain as an ally in the fight against Amazon to keep physical bookstores alive.
Alexandra Marshall reckons with writing about her husband’s suicide on Literary Hub, exploring the diverging demands of fiction and memoir when narrating trauma. Marshall writes, “[B]y embracing sorrow, and in refusing the easier option of denial, a greater opportunity is created: the transformation of grief into love.”
JRR Tolkien’s long-lost poetry will finally be made public, the Guardian reports. Seventy previously unpublished poems will be included in The Collected Poems of JRR Tolkien, to be published by HarperCollins next month.
Addie Tsai writes in Electric Literature about the failure of Frankenstein adaptations. Tsai critiques contemporary films, Poor Things and Birth/Rebirth, writing, “What these Frankensteins, and by that I mean the Creators of these adaptations, miss in the act of imbuing their own Creatures with life is that it was never the physical fact of them that made them monstrous. It was in the Creator’s refusal to contend with his own egoistic failure that caused him to spurn his own creation.”
Hettie Jones, a poet and writer who nurtured the Beats, has died at age 90, the New York Times reports. She and her husband, LeRoi Jones, published their literary friends before he disavowed their marriage and became Amiri Baraka. Ms. Jones was the author of twenty books.
In an opinion essay for the New York Times, Margaret Renkl writes about the vitality of the print book in her home. She emphasizes that she is in favor of every kind of reading (and all the formats books can take), but that she will always prefer the physicality of a print copy.
The final publishing industry sales estimates from the Association of American Publishers for 2023 are in, and sales fell .8 percent from 2022, Publishers Weekly reports. Sales had increased 6.1 percent between 2019 and 2023, a decent performance, but below the overall inflation rate. In 2023, sales of audiobooks jumped 18.2 percent. As several industry members have predicted, sales of digital audio are poised to pass e-book sales (which only rose 2 percent in 2023).
A survey finds most Americans are unengaged with book banning efforts in public schools, Publishers Weekly reports. The survey found that most adults feel informed about the issue, but only 3 percent of respondents said that they have personally engaged—with 2 percent working to maintain access to books and 1 percent seeking to restrict access.
Sarah Feldbloom interviews Martha Baillie about the ethics of making literature from a loved one’s suffering in Electric Literature. Baillie’s most recent book, There Is No Blue, responds to her mother’s death, her father’s life, and her sister’s suicide. Baillie explains, “In the end, I had to ask myself: am I doing this from a place of love? Am I doing this out of respect for this person?” She adds, “And if I am, then I have to hope that it’s worth going ahead. But it’s very important to me to make as clear as possible that I’m not an authority on anybody else’s experience.”
J Wortham writes for the New York Times Magazine about Audre Lorde’s enduring legacy, focusing on a new biography by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. The biography underscores Lorde’s prescient and passionate engagement with environmental justice.
Pasadena’s Red Hen Press celebrates thirty years, Publishers Weekly reports. In three decades, the inde press has published more than 600 titles in fiction and poetry. The 12-person staff is entirely women/nonbinary, and predominantly BIPOC and LGBTQ. Kate Gale, the CEO and cofounder of the press is confident about its future and growth: “I see Red Hen being one of the biggest presses on the West Coast,” she said.
The Guardian reports on how Ireland became a global literary powerhouse. The country has had four Nobel literature laureates and six Booker prize winners; its capital was the fourth Unesco City of Literature in 2010, and it has a thriving network of magazines, publishers, bookshops, festivals, and libraries. The article attributes some of this success to “an arts council that cares about literature and a culture of intergenerational benevolence.”
Kamran Javadizadeh writes for the New Yorker about the letters Emily Dickinson wrote to friends, family, and lovers. The article questions the prevailing notion that Dickinson was a recluse. “Writing letters,” he writes, could be “for Dickinson not only a withdrawal from the world but also a way of extending herself into many worlds, all at once.”
The novelist Nella Larsen wrote books that “were influenced by her training in the New York Public Library system,” writes H.M.A. Leow for JSTOR Daily. Larsen was the first woman with Black heritage admitted to the New York Public Library’s training school, where she studied in the early 1920s. The library had rigid ideas about the racial classification of knowledge, and Larsen wrote novels that rejected “systemized forms of knowledge production.”
Authors sue AI firm Anthropic for copyright infringement, Publishers Weekly reports. The potential class action lawsuit, brought by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, accuses the company, which will generate more than $850 million of revenue in 2024, of using a stockpile of pirated works to develop its Claude AI product.
The New York Times writes about how the push to diversify publishing fell short. Lisa Lucas, who became publisher of Pantheon and Schocken (imprints of Penguin Random House), in 2020, was abruptly let go in May. Her experience is representative of a larger trend. A demographic survey of the publishing industry showed that between 2019 and 2023, the percentage of Black employees in the book business remained at around 5 percent, and the percentage of Black executives hovered around 4 percent.
St. Martin’s Press responds to a publicity controversy in a new statement, shared by Publisher’s Weekly. An advocacy group called Readers for Accountability has been protesting SMP for months because of what they called “racist, Islamophobic, and anti-Palestinian” comments sent by an SMP employee. Most recently, the publisher sent an unsolicited PR box for Casey McQuiston’s The Paring that contained a sex toy. The marketing device renewed tensions between members of the advocacy group and SMP.
Louis Menand writes for the New Yorker about how bookstores have been forced to redefine themselves in the digital age. “[C]uration is probably still the way for bookstores to go. It no longer makes business sense for a small shop to stock a bit of everything.”
Sophie Vershbow considers when it is okay to not finish a book for the Atlantic. She encourages readers to recognize the limits of time, stop gamifying reading, and resist “completism.”
Though much of our consumption has turned digital, NPR revisits a conversation about vinyl records, CDs, DVDs, VHS tapes, and paper books—the physical media many of us still cherish.
Dozens of UK school libraries have been asked to remove LGBTQ+ books, a new survey finds, according to the Guardian. The Index of Censorship found that 53 percent of librarians polled were asked to pull titles from their collections.
Brandon Shimoda discusses his book The Afterlife Is Letting Go (City Lights, December 2024) with Publishers Weekly and reflects on his efforts to memorialize the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII.
Annie Berke considers the “woman writer” character in contemporary television for the Los Angeles Review of Books. Focusing on the TV series Bridgerton and Hacks, she writes, “The story of the woman writer out of time can serve as a critique, a prison sentence, or an invitation.”
Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux reflects on her experience navigating cancer and desire in the New Yorker. The essay is excerpted from The Use of Photography, translated by Alison L. Strayer, forthcoming from Seven Stories Press in October.
Spotify Audiobooks has partnered with W. W. Norton to produce and launch the audiobook for Richard Powers’s forthcoming novel, Playground, to be published on September 24. According to Publishers Weekly, the audiobook production features a cast of six narrators: Edoardo Ballerini, Pun Bandhu, Kevin R. Free, Krys Janae, Robin Siegerman, and Eunice Wong.
The Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation has announced the finalists for the 2024 book award, including A History of Burning by Janika Oza and Prophet Song by Paul Lynch in the fiction category and Built From Fire by Victor Luckerson and Red Memory by Tania Branigan in nonfiction. The winners will receive $10,000 each, and the first runners-up will receive $5,000 each, at an awards ceremony in Dayton, Ohio, the weekend of November 9-10, 2024.
The Washington Post reviews three new audiobooks—Whale Fall by Elizabeth O’Connor, Breaking the Dark by Lisa Jewell, and Clear by Carys Davies, all set in the British Isles—highlighting the importance the narrator: “A fumbled attempt can ruin a book, but when the storyteller captures, for instance, an Irish brogue or a Southern drawl, the result can draw the listener deeper in,” writes Katherine A. Powers.
The Poetry Foundation announced the 2024 Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellows: Rob Macaisa Colgate, Marissa Davis, Hermelinda Hernandez Monjaras, Chandanie Somwaru, and marion eames white. The $27,000 prize includes a subscription and an invitation to publish in Poetry magazine. Additionally, the Poetry Foundation will sponsor the fellows’ attendance at the Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark, New Jersey, where they'll participate in a public reading on October 19, 2024.
A fundraising campaign has raised nearly £250,000 (approximately $320,600) to repair a library in Liverpool that suffered fire damage to its ground floor when violence broke out in the area on August 3, following days of unrest around the UK. Hundreds of authors have also pledged to donate their books, according to the Guardian.
Barnes & Noble is eliminating certain books of erotica as well as public domain works and “summary” titles that bill themselves as guides to other popular books, reports Katy Hershberger of Publishers Lunch.
David Brooks of the New York Times writes an appreciation of Tom Wolfe, the author of The Right Stuff, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, and other classics. “Wolfe pulled off an astounding trick, turning sociology into art.”
The Bookseller reports on the “dismal or even disastrous” effects that the Paris Olympic Games had on the French capital’s bookstores, as traffic restrictions, “the massive exodus of Parisians,” and tourists more interested in sports than browsing books, deflated sales considerably.
For the Washington Post, Alma Katsu considers whether streaming television has changed readers’ expectations of pacing and how that may be affecting what we want out of a thriller novel.
Algeria’s first women’s boxing Olympic gold medalist has filed a criminal complaint in France against X (formerly Twitter) over alleged “cyber-harassment.” Among the figures named in Imane Khelif’s complaint is JK Rowling, the Guardian reports.
Applications are open for Penguin Random House Audio’s narrator mentorship program, according to Publishers Weekly. Launched in 2021, the initiative “aims to increase diversity and inclusion within the audiobook industry and develop new narrator talent, particularly from underrepresented groups.”
Tommy Orange, the author of There There and Wandering Stars, has been selected as the eleventh writer to contribute to the Future Library project, which each year invites an author to write a manuscript that will not be read until 2114, the Guardian reports.
Publishers Weekly reviews former president Barack Obama’s much-anticipated 2024 summer reading list, featuring James by Percivel Everett, There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib, Martyr! by Kaveh Akhbar, and nine others.
Following a ruling by federal appeals court judges on Friday, a law banning any book that describes sexual acts from K-12 schools, which was signed by Iowa’s Governor Kim Reynolds last May, can take effect. The ruling overturned a preliminary injunction issued in December by a federal judge, according to the New York Times. After the law was passed last year, thousands of books, including The Color Purple by Alice Walker and The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, were banned from schools around the state. The case will now go back to District Court.
Pioneering editor Betty Praskher, who helped launch the careers of authors such as Jean Auel, Dominick Dunne, Judith Krantz, and Erik Larson, has died at the age of 99, reports Publishers Weekly.
The Life of Herod the Great, a final novel by Zora Neale Hurston, will be published for the first time by HarperCollins imprint Amistad in January 2025. The Guardian reports that the author of Their Eyes Were Watching God was working on the sequel to her 1939 novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain, when she died in 1960.
The BBC looks at the rise of the Slow Living movement, as illuminated in several recent books, including Emma Gannon’s A Year of Nothing and Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks. “To be facetious about it: Hustle is out, and rest is in,” writes Holly Williams.
The Atlantic recommends six books, including the novels Personal Days by Ed Park and Temporary by Hilary Leichter, for readers wrestling with questions of modern employment, such as whether it’s time to quit.
Peter Heller offers a reading list for visitors to Denver, including Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s Woman of Light and Kent Haruf’s Plainsong, for the New York Times series Read Your Way Around the World.
Audible.com has launched an AI-powered feature that allows users to search for audiobooks using “natural language queries,” according to Publishers Weekly.
According to KIRO Newsradio in Seattle, officials at Washington State University in Pullman have decided to eliminate funding for Washington State University Press. The roughly $300,000 cut is effective at the end of December, at which point the press would be shut down. “We’re the only publisher that really covers the Inland Empire, Washington, Idaho, Oregon…and we work a lot with tribal communities to provide an outlet for their stories,” Linda Bathgate, the press’s editor in chief told KIRO Newsradio’s Feliks Banel. “So we feel that this was a very short-sighted, and maybe not a well-thought-out decision, maybe just a financial decision, but without consideration to the repercussions.”
The Community of Literary Magazines and Presses has awarded $350,000 in capacity-building grants to forty-six literary publishers, including Deep Vellum Publishing, the Feminist Press, Nightboat Books, and Ugly Duckling Presse. Recipients will receive grants of $5,000 or $10,000 to support projects that build organizational capacity and ensure greater sustainability. Through a similar program, the National Book Foundation has awarded $350,000 in capacity-building grants to forty-nine nonprofit literary organizations, including 826DC, Girls Write Now, and Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.
Flatiron Books, a division of Macmillan, will launch a new imprint, Pine & Cedar Books, next summer, reports Publishers Weekly. The imprint will publish “compulsively readable, story-driven novels” with a focus on “compelling plot, originality, and potential to leave a lasting impact on its readers.” Among the books on its inaugural list is King of Ashes by bestselling author S. A. Cosby.
The Utah State Board of Education has ordered schools to remove thirteen books from classrooms and libraries, including books by Margaret Atwood (Oryx and Crake) and Judy Blume (Forever), “because they have content considered pornographic or indecent under a new state law,” the New York Times reports. “It is a dark day for the freedom to read in Utah,” says Kasey Meehan, Freedom to Read program director at PEN America. “The state’s No-Read List will impose a dystopian censorship regime across public schools and, in many cases, will directly contravene local preferences.”
Pope Francis has said that reading novels and poems is valuable in “one’s path to personal maturity” and should be encouraged in the training of future priests, according to a report in the Guardian.
George Saunders reflects on his novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, which landed at number 18 in the New York Times list of “100 Best Books of the 21st Century.” (His story collections Pastoralia and Tenth of December also made the list, at numbers 85 and 54, respectively.)
Publishers Weekly previews ten noteworthy nonfiction debuts, including In Exile: Rupture, Reunion, and My Grandmother’s Secret Life by Sadiya Ansari and First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream by Jessica Hoppe. Be sure to check out “The New Nonfiction 2024,” forthcoming in the September/October 2024 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, for essays by five other debut nonfiction writers.
Two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward remembers learning to read and, eventually, discovering novels by Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, and Toni Morrison, in the Washington Post.
Sloane Crosley, who appeared on the cover of the March/April 2024 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, writes about the loss of a pet—and the stories we construct to fill their absence. “When I teach, I encourage students to find the second story. Tear up the floorboards of the first story and see what treasure lies beneath,” she writes in the New Yorker.
