Maya Angelou’s Ninetieth Birthday, Roxane Gay’s Pop-Up Magazine, and More
Joan Silber Wins PEN/Faulkner Award; Chinese government cracks down on Hong Kong booksellers; women on male authors describing women; and other news.
Genre: Creative Nonfiction
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
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“Literature is more of a community effort than most people realize.” Alexander Chee talks about how the essays came together for his first collection, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays (Mariner Books, 2018), with Rich Fahle of PBS Books at the 2018 AWP Annual Conference & Book Fair in Tampa.
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A Bookstore With No Staff, #saferLIT Campaign, and More
The “literary heart of America” is in Virginia; Barnes & Noble launches book app; Weike Wang wins PEN/Hemingway Award; and other news.
National Poetry Month, Anisfield-Wolf Winners, and More
Fifty new writers to watch; Elizabeth Ebert, the “grand dame of cowboy poetry,” has died; NPR’s Twitter poetry challenge; and other news.
Siri Hustvedt on Art and Science
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“I think physicists and poets are not as different as we like to think. The same unconscious processes are at work in both.” In this interview from the 2017 Louisiana Literature festival in Denmark, Siri Hustvedt talks about her background in neuroscience, the experiences of writing both nonfiction and fiction, and the value of approaching questions from different interdisciplinary perspectives.
Flashbacks in Literature, Emily Skaja Wins Walt Whitman Award, and More
Anita Shreve has died; Meg Wolitzer’s new novel; championship rounds of literary March Madness; and other news.
Neruda and Resistance, Garth Greenwell on the Growth of the Writer, and More
A takedown of Sean Penn’s debut novel; the similarities between Frank O’Hara and Notorious B.I.G.; Publishers Weekly’s bookstore of the year; and other news.
Missed Connection
The “missed connections” section of the classified advertisements website Craigslist has long been a virtual bulletin board to share a memory (i.e. I smiled at you on the train and you smiled back) in hopes that someone would answer back. Write a personal essay recalling a situation in which you may have missed an opportunity to connect with someone, whether a romantic or professional prospect, or a potentially significant person who may have slipped through your fingers. Explore ideas of fate and chance, persistence, lost opportunities, and assertiveness. How have your approaches to meeting new people evolved over time? Are there any missed connections from your past that might be picked up again now, years later?
Lost Charlotte Brontë Manuscripts, Literary March Madness, and More
Publishing veteran Judith Curr to join HarperCollins; Folio Prize finalists announced; teaching poetry during March Madness; and other news.
Xiaolu Guo
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“I found this liberation from the limitation…” In this Asia Society video, Xiaolu Guo explains why writing in English, her second language, is so freeing. Guo is the winner of the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award in autobiography for her memoir, Nine Continents: A Memoir In and Out of China (Grove Press, 2017).
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