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:
In advance of Harper Lee publishing her second novel, Go Set a Watchman, Christie’s will auction off six of Lee’s “exceptionally rare” letters next week. The letters, which Lee wrote to her friend Harold Caufield prior to the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, are expected to make up to $250,000 at auction. (Guardian)
National Book Award–winner Jacqueline Woodson has been named the new young people’s poet laureate by the Poetry Foundation. Woodson, who took the 2014 National Book Award in young people’s literature for her autobiographical novel in verse, Brown Girl Dreaming, will hold the post for two years, and will advise the foundation on projects focused on raising awareness of poetry for children. The laureateship comes with a cash prize of $25,000. (ABC News)
Stephen King’s fantasy literary dinner guests are Émile Zola, Thomas Hardy, and Flannery O’Connor, and he loves Anne Sexton’s poetry. Find out more about the best-selling novelist’s literary preferences at the New York Times.
The Paris Review has posted select content from its spring issue online, which features interviews with authors Hilary Mantel and Lydia Davis, as well as the first in-person interview with Elena Ferrante.
Oscar winner Juliette Binoche is set to star in an upcoming film about the life of novelist Pearl S. Buck. Buck won the Pulitzer Prize in 1931 for her novel The Good Earth, and in 1938 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for her “rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces.” (Variety)
Independent publisher Dzanc Books has merged with Hawthorne Books. Hawthorne will become an imprint of Dzanc, and Rhonda Hughes, Hawthorne’s founder and publisher, will serve as Dzanc’s director of marketing and publicity. (Publishers Weekly)
At the New York Review of Books, Helen Vendler considers the tragicomedy of John Berryman’s poetry: “Before The Dream Songs, Berryman was unable to leap from colloquial humor to bardic aspiration: it is precisely the triumph of the best Dream Songs to perform tragedy and comedy simultaneously.”
