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:
Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda has made a music playlist, “Write Your Way Out,” composed of nineteen literary-themed songs to help break through writer’s block. Available on Spotify, the playlist includes Eminem’s “Rabbit Run,” Vampire Weekend’s “Oxford Comma,” and Bob Dylan’s “My Back Pages.” (Los Angeles Times)
At the Washington Post, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee has penned a “conservative plea” to protect the National Endowment for the Arts.
Last night at a ceremony in New York City, the Whiting Foundation announced its 2017 Whiting Award winners, including poets Simone White and Phillip B. Williams, nonfiction writer Francisco Cantú, and fiction writers Jen Beagin, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Lisa Halliday, and Tony Tulathimutte. They will each receive $50,000. Read more about the winners at the Grants & Awards blog.
Jennifer Schuessler takes a tour of the office and archives of the Merriam-Webster dictionary with lexicographer Kory Stamper and finds, among other things, a pentagonal self-standing dictionary and the Backward Index, a cabinet of 315,000 cards listing words spelled backwards. (New York Times)
In Omaha, Jeff Alessandrelli has launched Fonograf Editions, a press that releases vinyl records of poets reading their work. An arm of the Portland, Oregon–based Octopus Books, the new press has so far released records of poets Eileen Myles and Rae Armantrout. (Omaha World-Herald)
The Getty Research Institute will open an exhibit next week on concrete poetry, or poetry that pays particular attention to the shape and visual appearance of words. Hyperallergic considers two progenitors of the form, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Augusto de Campos, who are both part of the Getty exhibit.
As part of a weeklong series about Walt Whitman, poet Jeffrey Yang meditates on the role of the ocean and water in Whitman’s work, and archivist Joshua Rothman considers a recently discovered Whitman novel, The Life and Adventures of Jack Engle, which was published pseudonymously in 1852. (New Yorker)
At the Guardian, Danuta Kean argues that as more celebrities and public figures, most recently Jamie Lee Curtis and Chelsea Clinton, sign children’s book deals, publishers risk alienating or pushing out more traditional children’s book authors
