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.
Jorie Graham has won the 2018 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry for her 2017 book, Fast. The biennial $10,000 prize is given by the Library of Congress for a book of poetry written by an American and published in the previous two years.
After being hidden for seventy years, the diary of Renia Spiegel, a Jewish girl in Poland during the Holocaust, was recently discovered inside a desk in New York. The diary is more than seven hundred pages long, and documents Spiegel’s life from ages fifteen to seventeen, up until her death at the hands of the Nazis just before her eighteenth birthday. (Smithsonian)
Barack and Michelle Obama have optioned Michael Lewis’s latest book, The Fifth Risk, with plans to adapt it into a Netflix series aimed at helping people better understand the inner workings of the government. (Deadline)
In a $1.4 billion acquisition, printing company LSC Communications will be acquired by Quad/Graphics, a purchase that will merge the country’s two largest printers. LSC reported book printing revenue of $1.1 billion in 2017, up from $925 million in 2016. (Publishers Weekly)
A public library in Iowa has received more than a thousand dollars in donations after a man checked out four LGBTQ children’s books and filmed a Facebook livestream of himself burning them. A GoFundMe was started to raise $300 to replace the books, and as of Wednesday it had raised more than $1,300. The library has also received more than a hundred donated books, including multiple copies of the books that were burned. (Hill)
“Books are very immediate to me. Even sentences and how they’re formed—they’re very sensory, almost tactile. I love the act of forming words.” At Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Tobias Carroll interviews Chaya Bhuvaneswar, author of the debut story collection, Dancing White Elephants.
“If every news cycle in your country leaves you more aghast than the one before it, conjuring an invented nation can be quite alluring. And when you find yourself feeling ever more estranged from the people leading your country, an invented or reimagined one can transport you.” Idra Novey, author of the new novel Those Who Knew, highlights ten dystopian books that challenge our political landscape. (BuzzFeed News)
