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Articles from Poet & Writers Magazine include material from the print edition plus exclusive online-only material.
The origin and form of Mayhill Fowler’s Huffington Post report on Barack Obama’s use of the word “bitter” suggest her work is neither blogging nor journalism, but creative nonfiction. That its effect was out of proportion with its intention begs the question: What can the creative nonfiction writer expect in the Information Age?
Beijing, despite its cheap food and beer—two dollars worth of Chinese yuan will buy you a nice Chinese meal or a twelve-pack of Tsingtao beer—has yet to become the Paris of the 21st century, but an expat fiction scene is beginning to emerge.
No two writers write alike, but when two hundred gather for an event—as they did at this year’s Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival, held at Christ Church College in Oxford from March 31 through April 6—some common themes tend to emerge.
The first time my then-fiancée mentioned Shanghai, China, and our future in the same sentence, we were canoodling in our favorite pizza place in Massachusetts. I, wildly in love, responded to the possibility with nothing more than a slight pause. “Move to China?” I asked. “Sure, why not!”
Ander Monson’s fourth book, the poetry collection Our Aperture, was published in January by New Michigan Press. It’s a short thirty pages, but it further extends the reach of the author’s genre-bending work. Poets & Writers Magazine recently asked Monson about his predilection for playing with genre.
Five years ago, as poets and readers attended the annual StAnza poetry festival, the war began in Iraq. This year’s festival, held from March 12 to March 16, acknowledged that anniversary explicitly with its two themes, “Poetry & Conflict” and “Sea of Tongues.”
Celebrated short story writer and poet Grace Paley died of cancer last August at the age of eighty-four. A lifelong activist, pacifist, and an early figure in the women’s rights movement in the 1960s, Paley was one of those writers who managed to combine a public life of frequent readings and appearances in support of a range of causes with work lauded for its artistic integrity. We interviewed Paley a little more than a year before her death at her home in Thetford.
Throughout his long career, Philip Levine has established a reputation for poems honoring the working class, beginning with the people he encountered as a young man laboring in the factories of Detroit. Though he has taught in writing programs nationwide since the 1950s, his poetry has maintained a stronger identification with the autoworker than the academic. Poets & Writers Magazine asked Levine, who turned eighty in January, how his writing is going these days.
With nearly four decades of editing experience, publishing veteran Pat Strachan reveals the qualities she looks for in fiction, her approach to editing, and how writers can help themselves navigate the industry.
Page One features a sample of titles we think you'll want to explore. With this installment, we offer excerpts from New Collected Poems by Eavan Boland and The Well and the Mine by Gin Phillips.
The short stories of Tobias Wolff, collected in four books during the past three decades, derive much of their strength from what is left unsaid—but what is said is usually violent and almost always disturbing.
The National Endowment for the Arts releases To Read or Not to Read—a follow-up to the nonprofit's 2004 report, Reading at Risk—which further expounds on America's declining reading habits.
“Can you really teach creative writing?” Professor and novelist Dan Barden answers this while offering his own unorthodox approaches to teaching a workshop.
A look at Jellyfish, winner of best debut feature at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival and written and directed by Etgar Keret, an Israeli fiction writer, whose most recent collection of stories, The Girl on the Fridge, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Former executive director of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop Quang Bao talks about his tenure with the organization and its influence on Asian literature over the past seventeen years.
The author of four poetry collections talks about his obsession with the unknown and the poem as a descendent of God.
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 Pindeldyboz, Narrative, and Bellevue Literary Review.
Small Press Points highlights the happenings of the small press players. This issue features New Directions, Milkweed Editions, Pushcart Press, City Lights Booksellers and Publishers, A Midsummer Night’s Press, and Akashic Books.
Why do some writers prefer company and background noise, while others need isolation? Why do some need the magical monotony of sameness, and others the inspiration of variety? What does it mean for a writer to be locked into a place? What does place even mean to a writer?
DailyLit, a Web site founded by a former Random House executive and a tech expert, provides its members with free delivery of over four hundred classic titles, such as Don Quixote and Ethan Frome.
A new study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project examines American's Googling habits and inspires contributor Frank Bures's self-reflection on his own obsession with the search engine.
A look at select images from Men of Letters and People of Substance, a collection of author portraits created with letters from the writers' names in the typeface that best represents the style of their work.
Page One features a sample of titles we think you'll want to explore. With this installment, we offer excerpts from Beautiful Children by Charles Bock, Behind My Eyes by Li-Young Lee, and Infamous Landscapes by Prageeta Sharma.
Former New Yorker poetry editor Alice Quinn discusses her final days at the magazine and looks ahead to more time spent in her role as the director of the Poetry Society of America.
