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.
Publishers Weekly reports on recent efforts to create more opportunities for people underrepresented in publishing. In March, for instance, Celeste Ng and We Need Diverse Books founded two new grants that would support interns from diverse backgrounds in adult publishing. Ng and other authors note, however, that more change needs to come from within publishers, not just from authors.
As protests against police brutality and anti-Black racism continue across the country, several poets, led by Nate Marshall and José Olivarez, are offering personalized poems to anyone who donates twenty dollars or more to a bail fund.
Yesterday poets Kaveh Akbar and Paige Lewis offered to send personalized comics to anyone who donated fifty dollars or more to a bail fund. In a recent tweet, Akbar reports they raised over $10,000.
Poet Danez Smith is buying and distributing essential supplies in the Twin Cities, and put out a call for donations via social media. So far, Smith reports they have received just under $40,000.
“People are so attracted to personal essays, so seduced by them, that this is where love spills to hate.” Porochista Khakpour discusses her new book, Brown Album, and her ambivalence about the personal essay as a form. (BOMB)
The Laurence H. Dorcy Hawaiian Foundation has donated $3.2 million to the University of Hawai’i in Mānoa in order to establish a new endowed chair in Hawai’ian studies, literature, and the environment. The new position is named in honor of Hawai’ian poet and environmental activist Dana Naone Hall. (Philanthropy News Digest)
Shanekia McIntosh talks to the Creative Independent about her work as a writer and performer, and bringing her passion for the arts to young people. “I do programs that I know if I was a kid at that age, I would be super psyched on.”
“We need to read books that are difficult or unorthodox, that don’t go down easily.” Ibram X. Kendi has curated an antiracist reading list. (New York Times)
And the Daily Shout-Out goes to Paper Republic, which recently launched a new online translation activity, Sunday Sentence. Every week the organizers will post a sentence in Chinese and invite translators to generate different ideas. “A famously lonely endeavor, translation, when done with others, becomes a rambunctious language game in which all the best nitpicking and head scratching go on. So since face-to-face workshops are called off for the foreseeable future, Paper Republic is launching Sunday Sentence.”