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Articles from Poet & Writers Magazine include material from the print edition plus exclusive online-only material.
Katherine Towler spent eight years writing her first novel Snow Island, published in February by MacAdam/Cage, an independent press in San Francisco. The novel tells the story of 16-year-old Alice Daggett and a reclusive World War I veteran, George Tibbits, who live on a New England island during the first years of World War II.
On December 8, 2001, Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali died of brain cancer at the age of 52. Ali taught creative writing at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst for seven years, and published eight books of poetry, including Rooms Are Never Finished (Norton, 2001), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. A posthumous collection of poems, Call Me Ishmael at Midnight, will be published by Norton in 2003.
In February New Directions will publish New Collected Poems by George Oppen. Born almost a century ago, Oppen fought and was injured in World War II, published his first book when he was in his mid-twenties, then stopped writing and joined the Communist Party. Twenty-five years later he resumed writing and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for his book Of Being Numerous. He died in 1984.
The short story collection Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee, to be published later this month by Verse Press-the nonprofit literary publisher that also publishes the triannual literary poetry journal Verse-represents a significant shift in focus for poet James Tate. The author of numerous books of poetry, including Worshipful Company of Fletchers (Ecco Press), which won a National Book Award in 1997, and his Pulitzer Prize-winning Selected Poems (1991), Tate has tackled a new genre, as well as a new way of thinking about writing.
After 15 years of publishing, Zoland Books has ceased operations. The independent Cambridge, Massachusetts-based publishing company produced approximately 125 books by authors such as Bill Berkson, Rudy Burckhardt, Lisa Jarnot, Ha Jin, Sheila Kohler, Ange Mlinko, John Yau, and Kevin Young.
Daniel Menaker's career moves are well known in publishing circles. After twenty six years at The New Yorker-he started as a fact checker and copy editor before serving as senior editor for twenty years-Menaker moved to the position of literary editor at Random House, where he worked for the past six years. Last month, he announced that he was joining HarperCollins Publishers as executive editor of the HarperCollins imprint. Menaker will report directly to Susan Weinberg, senior vice president and editorial director of HarperCollins, Perennial, and Quill.
Brenda Hillman's new book of poems, Cascadia, will be published by Wesleyan University Press in October. In it, Hillman returns to the ancient landform that preceded present-day California to excavate a poetics of place. Cascadia is a study of geologic as well as internal space, and the seismic shifts that occur in time through each.
With over sixty books published during a career that spans more than half a century, Robert Creeley is one of the most prolific and influential figures in American poetry. This month New Directions is publishing Just in Time: Poems 1984-1994, which collects three of Creeley’s previous books.
