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.
The Poetry Foundation has named Marilyn Chin the winner of the 2020 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, which confers $100,000 to a poet in recognition of outstanding lifetime achievement. The foundation also announced that Saskia Hamilton has received the $7,500 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism and Naomi Shihab Nye will extend her term as the Young People’s Poet Laureate.
Twenty-nine-year-old Marieke Lucas Rijneveld has won the 2020 International Booker Prize for their debut novel, The Discomfort of Evening, translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchison and published in the United States by Graywolf Press. Rijneveld and Hutchison will split the £50,000 prize purse. (Guardian)
Poet Ted Kooser has announced that he will retire as editor of his longtime weekly column, American Life in Poetry, at the end of 2020. Kwame Dawes will succeed Kooser as editor, with his first column to appear in 2021.
Carlin Romano will remain on the board of the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) after a vote held by members on Monday. NBCC policy stipulated that Romano would be removed if at least two-thirds of attending members voted for his removal; only 62 percent of attending members voted in favor. Romano came under scrutiny in June after other board members called him out for racism and anti-Blackness. (Publishers Weekly)
“As I revel in the success of recent and upcoming releases by Black writers, I catch myself wondering if this current groundswell will translate into sustained support for our storytellers, both past and present.” Roxanne Fequiere celebrates the success of recent titles by Brit Bennett, Yaa Gyasi, and Raven Leilani, and highlights the importance of recognizing and reading previous generations of Black writers. (Elle)
Brit Bennett talks with Maisy Card about adapting her books for screen, the differences in writing her second novel versus her first, and working to “heighten and tighten” the drama and emotion in her stories. (Glamour)
“Every writer who has ever been through a rigorous fact check knows that it is as awful as it is wonderful, as mind-canceling as it is comforting—a thing that you do because it is essential not only to make the piece true, but to make it good.” Emma Copley Eisenberg describes hiring and working with a fact-checker for her nonfiction book, The Third Rainbow Girl, and argues why the practice needs to be part of the publishing process in the book industry. (Esquire)
Poets and longtime friends Srikanth Reddy and Dan Beachy-Quick discuss grammar, history, and repetition, among other topics. (BOMB)
