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.
Megha Majumdar has been promoted from senior editor to editor in chief at Catapult. Majumdar, herself a novelist and the author of A Burning, has already worked with numerous acclaimed writers at Catapult, including Ruby Hamad, Randa Jarrar, and Matthew Salesses. She succeeds Jonathan Lee, who recently departed to serve as editorial director at Bloomsbury. (Publishers Weekly)
“Due dates form the rhythm of my life as a journalist, and there is some comfort in these external expectations. But a deadline is also a train barrelling down the track, and you’re the one strapped to the rails.” Rachel Syme turns to The Deadline Effect by Christopher Cox and How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell, among other sources, to think through the upsides and downsides of the “deadline-industrial complex.” (New Yorker)
“I’ve come from farming families. My grandfather is a bracero. My great-grandfather fought in the Mexican Revolution. And two or three generations later, I’m a poet.” Lupe Mendez looks forward to serving as the poet laureate of Texas next year. (Houston Chronicle)
Mendez is currently closing out his time as the literary outreach coordinator in Houston for Poets & Writers. Read his most recent dispatches from Houston on the United States of Writing blog.
“I’m very conscious of keeping the reader’s interest. And I’m easily bored—I’m easily bored by books, I hate to say.” Francine Prose talks to the New York Times about her latest novel, The Vixen, and the importance of entertainment.
Scholar and theorist Lauren Berlant died yesterday at age sixty-three. “Lauren Berlant’s pathbreaking scholarship defined the fields of affect theory, heteronormativity, and queer theory,” says Anne Walters Robertson, one of Berlant’s colleagues at the University of Chicago. “Their influence on generations of graduate students and colleagues was vast, and they will be profoundly missed.”
“Many writers have focused on why cruelty happens, and that is a worthwhile question, but Ai’s debut collection is more preoccupied with what cruelty is—it forces readers face-to-face with what we might rather turn away from.” Freesia McKee praises how the poet Ai used straightforward lineation—including many end-stopped lines—to address heavy subject matter. (Ploughshares Blog)
Xandria Phillips has earned a creative writing fellowship from the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, which will begin in fall 2021 and end in spring 2023. The fellowship is designed to give an emerging writer time to develop a new manuscript. (Pitt News)
“I seek writing that explores the potential of language to break down.” Elisa Taber discusses translating a trilingual edition of Miguelángel Meza’s chapbook Ita ha’eñoso / Ya no está sola la piedra formerly and again known as Pyambu / Dream Pattering Soles. (Harriet)
