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.
Nearly two years ago New York Times journalists Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey published an investigative report on the allegations of sexual harassment leveled at Harvey Weinstein that helped spark the #MeToo movement. Now Kantor and Twohey have written a book on how Weinstein and other men in positions of power concealed their behavior through secret settlements and restrictive nondisclosure agreements. She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement comes out tomorrow from Penguin Press. (New York Times)
“I enter poetry with intense scrutiny. I question whether English earned its existence on my page, in my space.” Jake Skeets talks to Kathy Fagan about his debut poetry collection, Eyes Bottle Dark With a Mouthful of Flowers, which Fagan selected as one of the winners of the 2018 National Poetry Series and will be released tomorrow by Milkweed Editions. (Rumpus)
During the 1950s, the CIA launched a mission to undermine the Soviet Union by passing copies of Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago—which had been banned by the regime—to readers behind the Iron Curtain. At NPR, Lara Prescott shares how her debut novel, The Secrets We Kept, retells the Cold War operation as a spy saga that combines the fictional story of a young woman working for the CIA with an account of Pasternak’s own real-life love story.
From escaping upstate to setting one’s desk to face a blank wall, the New York Times surveys the creative habits of highly effective writers, with tips from novelist Colson Whitehead, thriller author Ruth Ware, and critic and essayist Jia Tolentino.
“If we are afforded the least amount of time during our day—as, say, at the DMV while waiting for our number to be called or just before a morning meeting at work—reading poetry yields the simple pleasure of language outside normal usage and the chance of encountering the stark voice of a sole individual on its way to blessed enlightenment.” Major Jackson on the transformative power of literature, poetry’s lack of street cred, and editing The Best American Poetry 2019. (Paris Review)
At the New York Review Daily, Kian Tajbakhsh reflects on how reading informed the passage of time during his four and a half months in solitary confinement in a prison in Tehran, Iran. “The more books there were facing me, the more the time ahead of me began to take on a palpable, comprehensible texture. The panic of an immeasurable span of time seemed to reverse itself.”
Frank Ormsby has been named the Irish Professor of Poetry. In an interview for the Irish Times, he discusses the role of the arts in the treatment of illness, ekphrastic poetry, and his forthcoming collection, The Rain Barrel.
Frederick B. Quinene, poet laureate of Guam, has died at age seventy-seven. (Guam Daily Post)
