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:
Adrian Matejka has been named the new poet laureate of Indiana, succeeding Shari Wagner.
“Who in America is allowed to be ordinary and who must prove their humanity, as if it wasn’t already a given?” Lisa Ko, who published her debut novel about an undocumented Chinese immigrant, The Leavers, earlier this year, mediates on immigration and cultural assimilation. (BuzzFeed)
For the third consecutive year, Dartmouth’s Neukom Institute is soliciting submissions of Shakespearean or Petrarchan sonnets drafted using artificial intelligence. Prizes will be given for the poems that are most difficult to distinguish from a human-written sonnet. (Atlas Obscura)
“The very idea of unity—of homogeneity—seems to repel him.” Robyn Creswell considers the work and political and religious stances of Syrian poet Adonis. (New Yorker)
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was the most-read book on Amazon’s Kindle and Audible platforms this year, followed by It and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. (Publishers Weekly)
Jessica Faust, the poetry editor of the Southern Review, shares tips for submitting and what she looks for in a poem. (Frontier Poetry)
The Loft Literary Center has launched a book festival, Wordplay, which will bring more than a hundred authors to Minneapolis on a weekend in May. (Minneapolis Star Tribune)
At n + 1, Justin E. H. Smith remembers William Gass, who died last week, and the philosopher and novelist’s preoccupation with metaphor as “more than just a linguistic problem or a matter of how we represent the world.”
