Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—publishing reports, literary dispatches, academic announcements, and more—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today’s stories.
Six writers have earned $50,000 unrestricted awards as members of the 2022 cohort of United States Artists Fellows. They are Chen Chen, Kiese Laymon, Dawn Lundy Martin, Leroy F. Moore Jr., Emmy Pérez, and Grace Talusan. Given in various disciplines, including writing, film, and dance, the fellowships “recognize artists for their contributions to the field and allow them to decide how to best support their lives.” A total of sixty-three fellowships were awarded this year.
The member organizations of the Poetry Coalition have once again come together to plan programming around a pressing contemporary theme, this year addressing “The future lives in our bodies: Poetry & Disability Justice.” Through programs in fifteen cities throughout 2022, the more than twenty-five organizations that make up the Poetry Coalition will seek to “demonstrate how poetry can positively provoke questions in their communities about disability justice and spark increased engagement with this urgent topic.” Last year the alliance focused on the intersection of poetry and environmental justice.
“How do poets decide what comes next? How do they make us want to read another line, and another?” Elisa Gabbert considers the intricacies of the “lyric decision”—“this chess move where the poet breaks a line and almost resets the game.” (New York Times)
Laurie Hertzel writes in praise of reading without imposing a deadline. “I think back to when I was younger and how I read whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. It took as long as it took. I think that is the most satisfying kind of reading there is—immersing yourself in a book and not coming out until you’re good and ready.” (Star Tribune)
“The choral voice of Brown Girls came to me as if I were in a fever dream. I wrote the opening pages on my subway ride home from a graduate fiction workshop with the author Elissa Schappell.” Daphne Palasi Andreades discusses learning to “feel free on the page.” (Bomb)
“I liked the idea of writing about a romantic trip gone wrong, setting arguments against scenic backdrops. Fighting in a beautiful place carries its own conflict—as if wasting the city’s charms.” Ayşegül Savaş reflects on the ideas at play in her short story “Long Distance,” which recently appeared in the New Yorker.
“It feels like no one really has figured out a good way to accurately portray life in 2022, in movies or books.” David Sanchez, the author of All Day Is a Long Time, considers the challenges of writing amid the disorientation of modern life. (Chicago Review of Books)
Susan Stokes-Chapman spotlights ten books that showcase the range of retellings of Greek myth in literature, including Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson and An Orchestra of Minorities by Chigozie Obioma. (Guardian)
Emily Temple of Literary Hub offers “reading recommendations for every kind of being alone,” including Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo for those who miss socializing, and An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine for those who thrive in solitude.
