Articles

During the past year, poets laureate have been the unlikely recipients of national media attention. New Jersey's Amiri Baraka was excoriated for reading a poem that some labeled anti-Semitic, and California's Quincy Troupe resigned after inaccuracies were discovered on his resumé. With their public profiles growing, the role of poets laureate is being called into question. In April the nation's first conference for state poets laureate will convene in Manchester, New Hampshire, where they will discuss poetry and their responsibilities as public representatives of their art. 

Careful storytelling, along with careful marketing, has helped American Lives—the memoir series at the University of Nebraska Press—attract the attention of talented authors, national reviewers, and bookstore sales reps.

To coincide with National Poetry Month, the Library of America, a nonprofit publisher of American classics, will launch the American Poets Project, a new series of books devoted to individual poets and anthologies exploring particular themes, genres, and eras. 

In the last decade programs in Translation Studies, designed to train students in the theory and practice of literary translation, have flourished in American and European universities. Still, translators remain concerned about the future of their profession, fearing it will be undermined by a number of serious threats: English as a global language, computer translation, and the reluctance of publishers, at least in the English-speaking world, to take on the costs of publishing translations.