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:
“...I think we have an obligation, like an ethical obligation, to study what we love, what we want to preserve and keep with us and grow.” Ross Gay talks with Aimee Nezhukumatathil about joy, poetic control, and their collaborative chapbook, Lace & Pyrite. (Margins)
The National Endowment for the Arts has announced it will award $325,000 in Literature Translation Fellowships to twenty-five translators.
Writer Ron Carlson has resigned from UC Irvine after being accused of sexual misconduct with an underage student at a Connecticut boarding school during the 1970s. (Los Angeles Times)
The New Academy has announced the four finalists for its alternative to the Nobel Prize in Literature: Neil Gaiman, Haruki Murakami, Maryse Condé, and Kim Thúy. The New Academy, a group of Swedish cultural figures, formed the prize after the Nobel Prize in Literature was canceled this year due to a sexual harassment scandal. (Guardian)
“I take mystery very seriously…. I think when we come up against our true limits of knowing, when we hit the wall of mystery, we’re in a very good position to be reverent toward humans, toward ultimate reality, toward the ‘God’ that is beyond any belief or creed yet spoken by humans.” Poet Katie Ford talks to the Rumpus about mystery, theological language, and her most recent collection, If You Have to Go.
On the twentieth anniversary of the publication of the first Harry Potter book, the New York Times looks back at a selection of Potter memorabilia.
Lena Waithe and Sight Unseen Pictures have acquired the rights for Kiley Reid’s debut novel, Such a Fun Age, which Putnam will publish in Fall 2019. (Deadline)
“The proliferation of oddball residencies simply reiterates how hysterically difficult it is for contemporary artists who are not born rich to nurture or sustain any sort of creative practice.” Amanda Petrusich considers the point of artist residencies. (New Yorker)
