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“Do we always go and attend funerals and then after the funerals you go home and wait for another funeral, what? You have to document. You are forced to document.” In this video from the 2015 PEN World Voices Festival, Shireen Hassim moderates a conversation with Kehinde Bademosi, Zanele Muholi, and Binyavanga Wainaina to survey today's African gay rights landscape.
After undergoing more than two years of renovation at the New York Public Library’s main branch, this time-lapse video captures over fifty thousand books reshelved in two minutes. The reopening of the historic Rose Main Reading Room and the Bill Blass Public Catalog Room was celebrated in October 2016.
In this book trailer for his debut memoir, All Tomorrow’s Parties (Grove Press, 2016), Rob Spillman recounts defining experiences from time spent as a child in Berlin, Aspen, and Baltimore. Spillman, who serves as the editor of Tin House and the executive editor of Tin House Books, is featured in Agents & Editors in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“You do not believe you are sexy. You do not believe you are beautiful. You believe you are intelligent, but sometimes the effort to convince others isn’t worth it.” Jennifer Bartlett, whose essay "A Call to Action: Working Toward Inclusiveness for Poets With Disabilities" is in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, reads from “The Hindrances of a Householder” at the 2016 Split This Rock Poetry Festival in Washington, D.C.
“Self of steam,” “from the gecko,” and “lack-toes intolerant” are examples of the verbal errors that became points of inspiration for editor and writer Daniel Menaker, whose book collaboration with cartoonist Roz Chast, The African Svelte: Ingenious Misspellings That Make Surprising Sense (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), is featured in News and Trends in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine. Keep your eyes peeled for a verbal error in signs or newspapers, or think back to one you remember encountering in the past—perhaps even song lyrics you once misheard. Write a short essay inspired by the poetry of the mistake noting the memories, images, and idiosyncrasies that allow the error to “make surprising sense” to you.
For the launch of the poetry and essay anthology Of Poetry and Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin (Norton, 2016) edited by Phil Cushway and Michael Warr, devorah major reads Angela Jackson's contributions, as well as from her own work. major's new poetry collection, and then we became (City Lights Publishers, 2016), is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Claudia Rankine on black glamour; Dave Eggers launches music project to protest Trump campaign; debut novelist Max Porter on writing and editing; and other news.
As creative nonfiction writers, we face the difficult task of trying to capture people we know, often intimately, as characters. Here’s a prompt to help. Pick someone in a piece you’ve been working on. Choose the sense memory that best personifies your relationship with that person, the one moment or event that most purely embodies your particular dynamic. Write it as a scene. From that scene (my mom teaching me to bake bread as a little girl), list the qualities (capable, patient, encouraging) that person embodied and the emotions you felt (reverent, curious, happy). Every time you write a scene with this person, think about how the actions and dialogue exemplify the qualities and emotions on your list. Or if it is a scene in which this person behaves in a surprising way, focus on how the qualities and emotions in that scene are the opposite of your expectations.
This week’s creative nonfiction prompt comes from Sarah Tomlinson, author of the father-daughter memoir, Good Girl (Gallery Books, 2015). Read Tomlinson’s installment of Writers Recommend for more inspiration.
In this video from 2011, Jason Diamond reads from “When I Was Good” and “What Ever Happened to the Palmer Mansion” for the Franklin Park Reading Series. His first book, Searching for John Hughes: Or Everything I Thought I Needed to Know About Life I Learned From Watching '80s Movies (William Morrow, 2016), is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
