National Book Awards Judges, Best Translated Book Awards Longlists, and More

by Staff
4.2.20

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 National Book Foundation has announced the judging panels for this year’s National Book Awards. Roxane Gay, Terry Tempest Williams, Layli Long Soldier, Dinaw Mengestu, and Joan Trygg will chair for fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translated literature, and young people’s literature, respectively. Submissions for the awards are now open. 

The fiction and poetry longlists for the thirteenth annual Best Translated Book Awards were announced yesterday morning. Thirty-five books, translated from eighteen languages, made the cut. (Millions)

Publishers Weekly has named Porter Square Books of Cambridge, Massachusetts, the 2020 PW Bookstore of the Year. The magazine also dubbed Bob Barnett, the national sales manager for the University of Texas Press, the 2020 PW Rep of the Year.

Through the Poetry Society of America’s “Reading in the Dark” series, poets are sharing the poems they are turning to in these difficult times. In the latest installment, Brenda Hillman reflects on two poems by Barbara Guest

Kramerbooks & Afterwords Café in Washington, D.C., is using Postmates, the popular food delivery app, to send out books to local readers. The store piloted the program during the 2019 holiday season, which is proving especially useful now that the store is temporarily closed to the public: “We had a cafe menu with Postmates and thought it made a lot of sense to add books to our delivery offerings,” said Leah Frelinghuysen, a spokesperson for the store. (Publishers Weekly)

Bethanne Patrick recommends ten books forthcoming this month, including Sue Monk Kidd’s novel The Book of Longings, Julia Alvarez’s Afterlife, and Mary Gannon and Kevin Larimer’s The Poets & Writers Complete Guide to Being a Writer. (Washington Post)

Michelle Hart highlights forty-four new and forthcoming LGBTQ books. (O, The Oprah Magazine

Garth Greenwell, Ottessa Moshfegh, and other authors recommend isolation reads. (Strategist)

And the Daily Shout-Out goes to Ellen Bass whose latest poetry collection, Indigo, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press on April 7. “What I love most about this book is its subtleties, the ways it plants in any reader the need to turn the page, to know more even if it means more heartbreak,” writes Jericho Brown.