Q&A: Chip Kidd Covers Our Inspiration
Chip Kidd, whose famous designs have graced over eight hundred book jackets in the last twenty-four years, speaks about the cover he created for this issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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Article Archive
Articles from Poet & Writers Magazine include material from the print edition plus exclusive online-only material.
The Written Image: Somewhere Far From Habit
A look at one of the handcrafted books from Somewhere Far From Habit: The Poet and the Artist's Book, an exhibition opening at the Longwood Center for Visual Arts in Farmville, Virginia, which presents thirty collaborations between some of the country's most inspiring poets and accomplished book artists.
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The Word Wide Web
Before it was possible to read a novel on a Kindle, before there were text messages and Twitter, Gertrude Stein said, "I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do and as they have to do." As innovative as Stein was, it might have been hard for her to imagine today's digital landscape of language and the growing number of online dictionary and language sites, such as Urban Dictionary, Save the Words, and the recently launched Wordnik.
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Low-Residency MFA Comes to China
On January 15, City University of Hong Kong, an English-language school with seventeen thousand students and a campus notable for its urban, contemporary architecture, will begin accepting applications for a new low-residency MFA program in creative writing.
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Page One: Where New and Noteworthy Books Begin
With so many good books being published every month, some literary titles worth exploring can get lost in the stacks. Page One offers the first lines of a dozen recently released books, including Atiq Rahimi's The Patience Stone and Catie Rosemurgy's The Stranger Manual, as the starting point for a closer look at these new and noteworthy titles.
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Digital Digest: The Rise of the E-book Accelerates
It may not have been The Year Print Died, but 2009 will undoubtedly go down as the year digital literature became impossible to ignore. From celebrity authors' crowdsourcing stories through Twitter, to the proliferation of online publishing platforms, to the bruiting discord over the Google Book Search settlement, something new is plainly afoot in the publishing world, even if the ramifications for writers are still more a matter of conjecture than measurement.
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Small Press Points
Small Press Points highlights the happenings of the small press players. This issue features Madras Press, a publisher of individually bound stories and novellas.
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How to Get Unstuck: The Psychology of Writer’s Block
A look at the psychology of writers block and how scientific studies in creativity offer insight into how writers can use the tools they already have to break through.
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Beyond Words: Five Writers Who Practice Other Arts
Author-artists Michael Kimball, Michelle Wildgen, Jesse Ball, Abha Dawesar, and Jen Bervin talk about their "other" creative pursuits—cooking, photography, bookmaking, painting, and drawing—in relation to their writing.
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Iranian Named mtvU Poet Laureate
In October MTV’s college network, mtvU, surprised some of its more literary-minded viewers when it named Iranian poet Simin Behbahani as its next poet laureate. She is only the second poet, following John Ashbery, to hold the honorary post.
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Road Trip: A Profile of Sherwin Bitsui
Sherwin Bitsui’s new poetry collection, Flood Song—a sprawling, panoramic journey through landscape, time, and cultures—is well worth the ride.
Reading Books in Black and White
Author Carleen Brice recommends titles in honor of National Buy a Book by a Black Author and Give It to Somebody Not Black Month, the book-buying campaign she launched last year to heighten awareness of black authors who aren't as famous as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Colson Whitehead.
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Small Press Points
Small Press Points highlights the happenings of the small press players. This issue features BlazeVOX Books in Buffalo.
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Poets House Takes the Long View
On September 25, nearly two years after pulling up stakes in New York City's SoHo neighborhood, Poets House opened the doors to its new location in lower Manhattan, kicking off a long-awaited inaugural season of readings, workshops, exhibitions, and outreach programs.
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Page One: Where New and Noteworthy Books Begin
With so many good books being published every month, some literary titles worth exploring can get lost in the stacks. Page One offers the first lines of a dozen recently released books, including Jarvis Jay Masters's That Bird Has My Wings: The Autobiography of an Innocent Man on Death Row and Laura van den Berg's What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, as the starting point for a closer look at these new and noteworthy titles.
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School’s in Recession
For seventy-five years Louisiana State University, in Baton Rouge, has been home to two of the country's most storied literary institutions, LSU Press and the Southern Review. But prestige was not enough to save either one from a 20 percent cut in university subsidy in July.
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Literary MagNet
Literary MagNet chronicles the start-ups and closures, successes and failures, anniversaries and accolades, changes of editorship and special issues—in short, the news and trends—of literary magazines in America. This issue's MagNet features the Melancholy Dane, Isotope, Our Stories, Puerto del Sol, the Collagist, Alimentum, Crab Creek Review, and Forklift, Ohio.
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The Written Image: Mark Twain's Book of Animals
A look at engravings by Barry Moser that appear in the collection Mark Twain's Book of Animals, published last month by the University of California Press and featuring stories by Twain that have never before appeared in print.
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Q&A: Shenoda Fosters CalArts Diversity
Matthew Shenoda speaks about his new role as the Assistant Provost for Equity and Diversity at California Institute of the Arts, in Valencia, part of an institute-wide initiative to promote intercultural awareness and develop support mechanisms for students from varying ethnic backgrounds.
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Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Editor Jonathan Karp
As the editor in chief of Twelve, Jonathan Karp is always looking for good writing. Considering that half of all the books he’s published there have become best-sellers, that should make a lot of writers very, very excited.
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A Virtual Forum for Women Writers
She Writes, a Web site established for women writers, has joined the ranks of literary social networking utilities. Launched in June it aims to provide a place "where women writers working in every genre, in every part of the world, and of all ages and backgrounds, can come together in a space of mutual support."
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The Top Fifty MFA Programs in the United States: A Comprehensive Guide
In this excerpted version of his article from the November/December 2009 issue, contributor Seth Abramson reveals the methodology behind his ranking of the top fifty MFA programs in the United States, plus a ranking of the additional eighty-eight full-residency programs. For the full article and additional data for each program, including size, duration, cost of living, teaching load, and curriculum focus, see the November/December 2009 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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The Invisible Library
The Invisible Library, the blog that invites readers to submit the titles of unwritten books they’ve discovered in their own reading, served as the primary inspiration behind the Invisible Library exhibition, which ran from June 12 to July 12 at the Tenderpixel Gallery in London.
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Page One: Where New and Noteworthy Books Begin
With so many good books being published every month, some literary titles worth exploring can get lost in the stacks. Page One offers the first lines of a dozen recently released books, including Victor LaValle's Big Machine and Dan Chaon's Await Your Reply, as the starting point for a closer look at these new and noteworthy titles.
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World’s Largest Thesaurus Published
This month Oxford University Press is publishing the world's most comprehensive thesaurus. The two-volume, 4,448-page Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary is not only twice the size of Roget's version, the current standard, but it also lays claim to being the first historical thesaurus compiled for any language.