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Literary MagNet chronicles the start-ups and closures, successes and failures, anniversaries and accolades, changes of editorship and special issues—in short, the news and trends—of literary magazines in America. This issue's MagNet features Pleiades, Nashville Review, Sycamore Review, One Story, the Oxford American, the Awakenings Review, Fairy Tale Review, and Bound Off.
Small Press Points highlights the happenings of the small press players. This issue features Sidebrow, the San Francisco–based independent press that publishes "works by multiple authors who aren’t timid about crossing genre boundaries."
In the September/October 2009 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, we published the essay "Taking It to the Streets: My Year in Guerrilla Publishing" in which Mike Heppner writes about his trajectory from commercially published author to small press author to self-published, D-I-Y author. In this video, Heppner describes the final stage of his Man Talking Project: hand-delivering his manuscript to one of his readers.
The winners of this year’s fifty-thousand-dollar Whiting Writers' Awards, given to promising writers nominated by established authors and literary professionals across the United States, were announced last night at a ceremony in New York City. This marks the twenty-fifth year of the prizes, which have bolstered the early careers of luminaries including Jorie Graham, Denis Johnson, Alice McDermott, David Foster Wallace, and C. D. Wright.
The winning poets are Matt Donovan, author of the collection Vellum (Mariner Books, 2007); Jane Springer, author of Dear Blackbird (University of Utah Press, 2007); and L. B. Thompson, whose chapbook is Tendered Notes (Center for Book Arts, 2003). The fiction winners are Michael Dahlie, author of the novel A Gentleman’s Guide to Graceful Living (Norton, 2008); Rattawut Lapcharoensap, author of the short story collection Sightseeing (Grove Press, 2004); and Lydia Peelle, author of the story collection Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing (Harper Perennial, 2009). The nonfiction winners are Elif Batuman, author of The Possessed, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux last February; Amy Leach, whose essay collection about animals, plants, and stars is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2012; and Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, author of the memoir When Skateboards Will Be Free (The Dial Press, 2009).
Six of the winners hold MFAs—from New York University, University of Iowa’s nonfiction program, University of Michigan, University of Virginia, and Washington University—and two hold doctorate degrees. Among the magazines that have published multiple winners’ works are Granta, the New Yorker, and Orion. Full biographies on the winners are posted on the Web site of the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, sponsor of the awards.
In the video below, creative nonfiction winner Sayrafiezadeh reveals a dirty little literary secret.
One of this year's MacArthur fellows, each of whom received $500,000, is Matthew Carter, a master type designer, who during his career has designed over 250 fonts. Most recently Carter has focused on developing easily readable fonts for computer screens, including those for handheld devices.
The Practice of the Wild, a documentary film about Pulitzer-Prize winning poet Gary Snyder, who has been called the poet laureate of deep ecology, premieres in New York City on November 12.
In this video for her new book, Inferno (A Poet's Novel), forthcoming from OR Books in November, poet Eileen Myles's talks about writing as a revolutionary impulse.
Originally produced for a sales conference by the UK branch of Dorling Kindersley Books, this video was inspired by a similar palindromic clip titled "The Lost Generation."
The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston offered residencies of one to three months from July 1 to November 30 to mid-career poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers at the Dora Maar House in Ménerbes, France. Residents were provided with travel expenses, private lodging, work space, and a $50 daily stipend. Using only the online application system, writers submitted two work samples of up to 20 pages each, a curriculum vitae, a project description, a proposal for a community event, and two letters of recommendation with a $20 application fee by February 15.
Brown Foundation Fellows Program, Dora Maar House, Museum of Fine Arts, P.O. Box 6826, Houston, TX 77265. (713) 639-7345.
Russian anchorwoman Tina Kandelaki speed-recites a poem by Joseph Brodsky while driving over 150 miles per hour. Why? Because she can.
