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:
Barbershop Books has won the National Book Foundation’s $10,000 Innovations in Reading Prize. Based in New York City, the program has created child-friendly reading spaces for boys ages four to eight in forty-nine barbershops across eleven states.
As part of a bipartisan agreement on a bill to fund the nation’s federal agencies and programs through September, Congress has approved funding for federal arts programs. The agreement includes increases of $2 million to the budgets of both the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and National Endowment for Humanities (NEH) for the rest of this fiscal year. The agreement is a temporary victory for advocates of art funding, as the Trump administration’s original budget plan called for the elimination of the NEA and NEH. The federal budget for the 2018 fiscal year, which starts October 1, is still going through the legislative process. (Los Angeles Times, Arts Action Fund)
“Despite the decades-long attempts on the right to paint the NEA as rarefied snobbery welching off the state, 40 percent of NEA activity happens in high-poverty areas.” At the New Yorker, Rich Benjamin rebuts the argument that the NEA is “welfare for rich, liberal elites.”
The Reading Agency has published a study about what U.K. citizens read and what they lie about reading: 41 percent of readers (and 64 percent of millennial readers) will fib about what or how much they’ve read.
Writer and editor Jean Stein has died at the age of eighty-three. Known for her oral histories of Edie Sedgewick, Robert Kennedy, and Los Angeles, Stein committed suicide on Sunday in New York City. (TIME)
“Libraries transform us, and they transform themselves.” Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden reminisces about the card catalogue, and talks about the library’s new initiative to make library catalogues available online and “connect our library tributary to the big river of the Internet.” (Publishers Weekly)
“My job as a fiction writer is to get the reader to embrace the feelings like the ones they experienced as a child, and have long forgotten—back when our perceptions were still pure, when we were not yet corrupted by false language.” Elizabeth Strout talks about memory; her latest book, Anything Is Possible; and one of her favorite poems, Louise Glück’s “Nostos.” (Atlantic)
Artist Guy Laramée has created a new exhibit of book sculptures—Laramée turns stacks of books into mountainous landscapes and caves. (Colossal)
