Poetry of Exile, a Literary Guide to the Cannes Film Festival, and More

by
Staff
4.14.17

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:

“The Hmong people will sort of be perpetually lost without that sense of a homeland, because we don’t have a way to go back.” Poet Mai Der Vang discusses her debut collection, Afterland, which investigates the history of her family and the Hmong people, “who are always in exile.” Afterland won the 2016 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, and was published last week by Graywolf Press. (PBS NewsHour)

Meanwhile, fiction writer Shanthi Sekaran discusses her new novel, Lucky Boy (Putnam), which examines the complexities of immigration and infertility. (Rumpus)

In the New York Times’s latest Bookends column, writers Adam Kirsch and Liesl Schillinger discuss whether elitism or populism is more harmful to the arts.

Literay Hub offers a literary guide to this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

A Universe Explodes, a new digital book published by Editions At Play, isn’t a typical e-book, but rather an “experiment in ownership.” Only a hundred people own original versions, but may share the book via e-mail through a somewhat strange process. (Wired)

“I am very conscious of trying to find voices and stories that are outside the straight white narrative that dominates so much of the culture.” Anna deVries, executive editor at Picador USA, speaks with Lambda Literary about being out in the publishing world and championing overlooked voices in fiction and nonfiction.

New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead considers Margaret Atwood’s “grimly playful” additions to a newly released edition of The Handmaid’s Tale audiobook.