Kakutani Book Deal, Poetry and the Male Identity, and More

by
Staff
8.15.17

Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today’s stories:

Michiko Kakutani, who recently left her post as the chief book critic of the New York Times, has signed a multiple-book deal with Crown’s Tim Duggan Books. Her first book, The Death of Truth, which will offer a cultural history of alternative facts, will be published next year. (New York Magazine)

Poet Alberto Ríos has been named the new director of the Virginia C. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University, where he has taught for more than thirty years.

At the Virginia Quarterly Review, Porochista Khakpour searches for a new vision of masculinity and male identity in the work of five poets: Alex Dimitrov, Kaveh Akbar, Danez Smith, Chen Chen, and Chiwan Choi.

“As a woman of color, I experienced the Grounds as a safe, welcoming space. But now I am learning that the University will, apparently, allow this safety to be contingent upon the convenience of hate groups who have chosen to turn the very Rotunda where I received my diploma into a site of violence.” Poet Kiki Petrosino writes an open letter to Teresa Sullivan, the president of University of Virginia, arguing against her decision to allow the public gathering of far-right groups on campus on Saturday.

Irish novelist Eimear McBride has won the £10,000 James Tait Black Prize for fiction, Britain’s oldest literary award, for her second novel, The Lesser Bohemians. (Guardian)

“I’m asked to pose in a couture gown, holding a baby goat, for a profile in Vogue.” Novelist Edan Lepucki lists thirty-one writer dreams. (Millions)

“I think literature is the best technology we have for communicating the experience of consciousness, for capturing what thinking feels like.” Garth Greenwell talks about fiction with the New Yorker, which published his short story “An Evening Out” this week.

“And, again, poetry does feel like the first—and in some ways best—language I ever had for mystery and for my sense of what exists beyond the world we’re currently living in.” Poet Molly McCully Brown talks with Fresh Air’s Terry Gross about poetry, living with cerebral palsy, and her collection, The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. (NPR)