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Articles from Poet & Writers Magazine include material from the print edition plus exclusive online-only material.
As he steps into his new role as the NEA’s literature director, Ira Silverberg speaks about the books that first drew him to literature and how he’s currently serving the field at the nation’s largest art organization.
In a fight against the controversial Arizona House Bill 2281, which effectively bans ethnic-studies classes and curricula, novelist Tony Diaz and other members of the Texas-based arts advocacy group Nuestra Palabra have formed a network of writers and supporters to raise awareness about the impact of the bill and to counter its effects with initiatives such as “banned book bashes” and the building of underground libraries.
Fiction writer Jami Attenberg shares her experience using social-media platform Tumblr and offers advice to authors who want to get started themselves.
With so many good books being published every month, some literary titles worth exploring can get lost in the stacks. Page One offers the first lines of a dozen recently released books, including Carmen Bugan’s Burying the Typewriter and Joyelle McSweeney’s Percussion Grenade, as the starting point for a closer look at these new and noteworthy titles.
Three authors who followed very different paths to publication in 2011 speak about what they learned after their books were published, including hard lessons about publicity and reviews, readings and events, and advertising and sales.
Twenty-five years after poets Thomas Sayers Ellis and Sharan Strange founded the Dark Room Collective as a community for established and emerging African American writers, members have gathered for a reunion tour that celebrates the DRC’s rich history and far-reaching influence in the literary world.
Despite worries that digital media sounded the death knell for serious, immersive reading, publishing platforms such as the iPad, Kindle, and Nook have given rise to single-sitting works—longform journalism pieces, single stories, and short novellas—that have broad reader appeal.
Small Press Points highlights the innovative and can-do spirit of independent presses. This issue features Stoneslide Books, a recently launched fiction press looking for narratives that prompt readers “to think, to ask questions, to move the mind forward.”
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 Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Conjunctions, Phantom Drift: A Journal of New Fabulism, Fairy Tale Review, and Unstuck.
In this issue we offer a look at a new, illustrated translation of the Antigone of Sophocles. Antigonick, a collaboration between poet Anne Carson and poet and artist Bianca Stone, was released by New Directions in May.
Three debut authors compare notes about everything from working with an editor to choosing a cover.
In this regular feature, we offer a few suggestions for podcasts, smartphone apps, Web tools, newsletters, museum shows, and gallery openings: a medley of literary curiosities that you might enjoy. This issue’s 3 for Free features the WordNet app, the Books on the Nightstand podcast, and online video poetry journal Jupiter 88.
With so many good books being published every month, some literary titles worth exploring can get lost in the stacks. Page One offers the first lines of a dozen recently released books, including Cathy Park Hong’s Engine Empire and Rajesh Parameswaran’s I Am an Executioner: Love Stories, as the starting point for a closer look at these new and noteworthy titles.
The website Small Demons and the X-Ray feature of Amazon’s e-readers are the first in a new crop of digital literary tools that promise to change how readers interact with texts. By equipping users with digital reference frameworks, these new meta-analytical approaches give readers immediate access to the contextual worlds of literary works.
In this issue we offer a look at Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Are You My Mother? published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt this month.
As Tree Swenson prepares to step down after ten years at the helm of the Academy of American Poets in New York City, she speaks about her next role as the executive director of the Richard Hugo House and returning to the Pacific Northwest.
Started by husband-and-wife writers Stona and Ann Fitch, Concord Free Press is using a philanthropic publishing model to successfully distribute limited-edition books at no cost, upon request.
As literature concerned with today’s often-grim realities gains new prominence, a handful of literary organizations are highlighting the connection between poetry and politics and strengthening the network of socially conscious writers.
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 Southwest Review, Oxford American, Midwestern Gothic, the Los Angeles Review, ZYZZYVA, Hawk & Handsaw, and Common.
Small Press Points highlights the innovative and can-do spirit of independent presses. This issue features Black Balloon Publishing, the New York City–based publisher of “the weird, the unwieldy, the unclassifiable.”
A look at the risks and rewards of book-publication contests, including an overview of the contest model, a breakdown of the budgets behind three major book prizes, the intangible benefits of winning, and an interview with four frequent judges.
Organizers of writing contests are, perhaps not suprisingly, wary of publicizing details of their budgets, but the organizers of three contest programs offered to share the numbers behind their 2011 contests as part of contributing editor Michael Bourne's “The Economics of Competition,” which serves as the centerpiece of the current issue’s special section on the risks and rewards of writing contests.
The agent of Jami Attenberg, David Mitchell, Carolyn Parkhurst, Matthew Quick, and others offers guidance about publishing credits, MFA programs, and unagented submissions.
In her memoir, Wild, published in March 2012, author Cheryl Strayed reveals all she lost following the death of her mother, and takes readers along on her three-month hike through the wilderness to find it again.
The late poet laureate Philip Levine spoke in early 2012 about his plans for the position and the range of influences on his work through the years.
