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:
In the wake of the presidential election, Electric Literature has compiled a list of organizations that are looking for writers to volunteer, including the Girls Write Now mentor program and the Arab-American Family Support Center.
Several American women writers, including Jennifer Egan and Joyce Carol Oates, reflect on the role gender played in the outcome of the 2016 election. (Guardian)
Meanwhile, poet Lynn Melnick discusses how her work with VIDA: Women in Literary Arts informs her poetry and vice versa, and the process of coediting the 2015 anthology Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation (Viking). Melnick’s second collection, Landscape With Sex and Violence, will be published in Fall 2017 by YesYes Books. (Ploughshares)
On a recent BBC News broadcast, acclaimed fiction writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie responded to American Spectator editor-in-chief Emmett Tyrell’s comment that Donald Trump had not been racist throughout his campaign. “I am sorry,” she says, “but if you are a white man, you don’t get to define what racism is.” (BuzzFeed)
“More desperately than ever, we need our libraries now, and all three of their traditional pillars: 1) education, 2) good reading, and 3) the convivial refuge of a place apart. In other words, libraries may be the last coal we have left to blow on.” Former National Endowment for the Arts literature director David Kipen stresses the continued need for our nation’s libraries. (Los Angeles Times)
Elaine Blair writes at the New Yorker about the cult following and recent resurgence in popular culture of Chris Kraus’s 1997 autobiographical novel, I Love Dick. Award-winning director Jill Solomon released a pilot television adaptation of the book in August.
Tobias Carroll lists seven fiction and nonfiction books that explore the boundaries, evolutions, and effects of language, including Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Other Words, and Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others. (Signature)
Chilean film director Pablo Larrain talks about his Academy Award–nominated biopic, Neruda, and why he chose Nobel Prize–winning poet Pablo Neruda as a subject. Neruda opens in theaters nationwide on December 16. (Hollywood Reporter)
