Disabled Writers on Publishing, How Libraries are Dealing With #MeToo, and More

by
Staff
5.8.18

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:

“As I grow in my writing, I am getting better at making my disability the lens through which I see the world, and not the subject.” Keah Brown, Esmé Weijun Wang, and Jillian Weise discuss writing and publishing as disabled writers. (Electric Literature)

In the wake of the #MeToo movement, how are libraries handling the presentation of books by writers and figures accused of sexual misconduct and harassment? Quartz investigates.

Writer Ian McEwan helped his son write a high school paper about his 1997 novel, Enduring Love, and his son got a C+. (Los Angeles Times)

“I was also thinking about the idea of trying to find a solace in not having a utility. Utility strikes me as a state of anxiety, like you’re trying to be in Beast Mode all the time. But I’m asking if there can be solace in just being.” Poet Tommy Pico talks about writing his latest poetry collection, Junk. (Stranger)

The Guardian spends an afternoon with Lorrie Moore, who discusses her conservative upbringing, her take on the 2016 presidential election, and her new essay collection, See What Can Be Done.

“The book… offers an unnerving interrogation of modern conceptions of the earliest African Americans.” Tayari Jones reviews Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo,” Zora Neale Hurston’s book about Oluale Kossula, one of the last men brought to America in the transatlantic slave trade. The book was written in the 1920s and published yesterday. (Washington Post)

The Smithsonian traces the boom in young adult literature back to two pivotal books published in 1967: S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders and Robert Lipsyte’s The Contender.

Rumaan Alam talks with NPR about his new novel, That Kind of Mother—which tells the story of a white woman who adopts a black son—and how he approaches writing about issues of gender and race not immediately familiar to him.

“It is impossible to name the single best writer for the same reason that you can’t speak of the single best human being: There are too many different criteria for judgment.” Adam Kirsch on why the Nobel Prize in literature is flawed. (Atlantic)