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:
The United States Senate has confirmed Carla Hayden as the fourteenth librarian of congress. Hayden is the first woman and first African American to hold the position. (loc.gov)
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) announced new additions to its Big Read program and library. To celebrate the initiative’s tenth anniversary, the Big Read library will acquire more contemporary books written since the NEA’s founding fifty years ago. Additions to the library include titles by Claudia Rankine, Emily St. John Mandel, Joy Harjo, and Kevin Young.
“These poems do carry some greater obligation to test their joy against despair or injustice—to make themselves answerable and available to the mutilated world.” At Literary Hub, Jonathan Farmer considers the various approaches to joy and praise in the poetry of Ross Gay, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Alan Shapiro, and Paisley Rekdal.
An essay at the Guardian looks at how several new memoirs from young women, including Lena Dunham and Melissa Broder, waver between advancing and reducing feminism through their explicit self-exposure. “We’re on an uncomfortable tightrope between a bold new dialogue about women and sex, and the monetization of that conversation by powers that recognize that as a gap in the market.”
Poet Sam Sacks examines how the work of French poet Yves Bonnefoy aimed to unite the traditions of American and French poetry. Bonnefoy, widely considered France’s “greatest poet of the past fifty years,” died earlier this month at age ninety-three. (New Yorker)
More than a hundred fifty poets and writers including Naomi Shihab Nye, Dave Eggers, and Alice Walker have signed an open letter calling for the release of Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour, who was arrested in Israel last year for sharing poetry on social media platforms. (Hyperallergic)
Before winning the Man Booker Prize in 2015 for his novel A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James spent a decade designing album covers for his friend, Jamaican dancehall star Sean Paul. (Fader)
