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:
Yesterday the National Book Foundation announced the launch of the National Book Award for Translated Literature, which will be given annually for a work of fiction or nonfiction translated into English. (New York Times)
Today is World Read Aloud Day, an annual event founded by LitWorld to celebrate literacy as a human right. At the Washington Post, book critic Ron Charles describes reading books aloud to his wife for the past thirty years.
To mark Black History Month, which starts today, Penguin Classics is reprinting W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1903 essay collection, The Souls of Black Folk, and five Harlem Renaissance novels, including Nella Larsen’s Passing and Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry. (NPR)
An artificial intelligence researcher has written a book about the science of swearing—how swearing impacts the credibility of the speaker, as well as how gender influences the perception of curses. (Smithsonian)
Atlas Obscura rounds up the literary maps featured in a new exhibit at Harvard’s Houghton Library, “Landmarks: Maps as Literary Illustration.”
Weike Wang talks about the similarities between writing and science, pushing against Asian American stereotypes, and her debut novel, Chemistry. (Margins)
Australian writer Sarah Krasnostein won $125,000 Australian at the Victorian Premier Literary Awards last night for her memoir, The Trauma Cleaner. (Guardian)
In honor of the late Muriel Spark’s hundredth birthday today, the New Yorker has posted recordings of the writer reading from her memoir, Curriculum Vitae, and her novel The Public Image.
