In Cheryl Strayed's new memoir, Wild (Knopf, 2012), the author recounts her months-long hike along the Pacific Crest Trail, a journey that she took entirely alone after life as she'd known it had fallen apart. "It was a world I'd never been to and yet had known was there all along," she says, "one I'd staggered to in sorrow and confusion and fear and hope. A world I thought would both make me into the woman I knew I could become and turn me back into the girl I'd once been." Write about a time when you got a little wild—when you embarked upon something new and challenging, maybe something frightening, or maybe even a little dangerous. Write about the wilderness itself, but also about what brought you there, and who you had become by the time you walked back out of the woods.

Write a piece of flash fiction or a short story that starts with an advice column. Use the advice column to introduce the story's protagonist, the central drama, or the back story of the characters. Alternatively, read through advice columns such as the Rumpus's Dear Sugar and Salon's Since You Asked and create a story based on the problem posed by one advice-seeker.

A cento, Latin for "patchwork," is a poem composed entirely of fragments and lines taken from other poems and/or written sources. Try creating your own patchwork poem by incorporating lines from various poems in a poetry anthology. For inspiration, read David Lehman's cento in the New York Times.

Last night we attended a unique book launch for New York City poet Elana Bell, featured in our May/June 2012 issue's "Winners on Winning" feature. Bell, who incorporated a dance performance and fund-raiser into the celebration of her debut collection, is the recipient of the 2011 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets for Eyes, Stones, released in April by Louisiana State University Press.

When we interviewed Bell for our May/June article about the unexpected rewards of winning a book prize, she mentioned that she was using some of the prize money to realize an artistic vision. "Many of the poems in the collection are persona poems, in the voices of contemporary and historical characters who are inexorably linked to the land of Israel/Palestine," she said. "Sometime during the process of creating this book, I knew that I wanted to create a performance version based on the text. I wasn't sure what it would look like, but I knew it would be collaborative and somehow address the question: 'How can two narratives exist in one body?' When I found out I'd won the Whitman, I decided that rather than have a traditional book release party, I would create a performance piece with dancers and musicians addressing that question."

The piece premiered at a standing-room-only event that also included a silent art auction to benefit Just Vision, a nonprofit organization that promotes social justice in Israel and Palestine. A selection from the performance is featured in the video below.

[This article has been updated. An earlier version of this article failed to mention the sponsor for the Walt Whitman Award. The prize is given annually by the Academy of American Poets.]

Think back to the closet of your youth, and write an essay about what was inside. Let the contents of the closet become a metaphor for who you were as a child, who you might have wished to be, and who you have become.

Write a story that begins like this:  On the morning Bill Somers shot his dog, I was...

The Believer's May issue has arrived, and with it, the announcement of the magazine's literary awards for books of poetry and fiction published in 2011. The honors are given annually for poetry collections deemed by the magazine's editors to be "the finest and most deserving of greater recognition" and novels and short story collections that are the "strongest and most underappreciated of the year."

Massachusetts poet Heather Christle takes the second annual Believer Poetry Award for The Trees The Trees (Octopus Books), her "casually incandescent second collection." (Her third book, What Is Amazing, was released by Wesleyan University Press this past February.)

Author of three poetry collections himself, New York City author Ben Lerner receives the seventh annual Believer Book Award in fiction for his "hilarious and sensitive" debut novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (Coffee House Press). The book, which made it onto a number of best-of lists last year, was also a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Young Lions Fiction Award given by the New York Public Library.

Along with the winner announcements, the Believer also released a list of the books most nominated for shout-outs in its readers survey. Coming out on top in poetry are Tracy K. Smith's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, Life on Mars (Graywolf Press), Dean Young's Fall Higher (Copper Canyon Press), and Carl Phillips's Double Shadow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which won this year's Los Angeles Times Book Prize in poetry. In fiction, readers' most frequent picks were The Art of Fielding (Little, Brown) by Chad Harbach, Pulitzer-nominated Swamplandia! (Knopf) by Karen Russell, and The Sisters Brothers (Ecco) by Patrick deWitt. The full account (summer reading list, anyone?) is posted on the Believer's website.

In the video below, Christle reads from her winning book at the Stain of Poetry reading series in New York City.

With the almost daily news about signifcant changes to the publishing industry, we reached out to veteran literary agent Anne Edelstein for some perspective on how things have changed and what it means. Edelstein has been an independent agent for over twenty years. Some of her clients include Mark Epstein, Jody Shields, and Russell Shorto.

POETS & WRITERS: You spent time at Harold Ober Associates, a storied agency that represented F. Scott Fitzgerald, J. D. Salinger, the estate of Langston Hughes, etc., and has a reputation of being steeped in the past, in an older way of doing things. Tell me about your earliest days there, and as an agent. What is the most remarkable difference between then and now?

ANNE EDELSTEIN: It was probably fifteen years ago that I worked briefly at Harold Ober, really only for the matter of a few months. Yes, it was even an old way of doing business back then. I remember bringing my own computer to the office in order to have one to work on. After having already spent a few years running my own agency, mostly representing writers who were starting out, rather than estates, my pace and organizational structure was very different from that of Ober. After a few months, I realized that I preferred my own approach, and went back to my own office where I could represent foreign rights directly, keep my own files and do the bookkeeping on a computerized system, which I immediately streamlined further. 

P&W: The publishing industry is in a state of flux. For some, it's an exciting time, for others it's gloom and doom. Is right now the worst it's ever been? Or is the worst behind us? Are you hopeful? Wary?

AE: The business is indeed in a state of flux unlike ever before. There have always been phases of gloom and doom that seem to pass and then return. But this doesn't seem like a phase so much as a major shift of technology and sensibility. 

P&W: In light of evolving publishing models, do you see new roles agents must play?

AE:  Like many agents, I find myself working much harder on the development of manuscripts and proposals before allowing them out into the world, and encouraging authors to be more astute than ever about aspects of publicity and promotion, and of course dealing with authors' electronic backlist. The biggest issue is that authors need to be paid enough to allow them to continue what they do best, and therefore an openness to new venues of publishing and publicizing is essential.  The bright side is that new opportunities should continue to unfold, and that people so far still seem to appreciate a good, well-written book.