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:
Penguin Random House has lined up publishers from across the world to release Barack and Michelle Obama’s forthcoming books, which the publisher acquired last month. In addition the to the United States, the books will be published in several countries including the United Kingdom, Australia, India, Spain, and Mexico. (ABC News)
The New Yorker, which has published a long-lost story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The I.O.U.,” chronicles its uneasy relationship with the writer, who held himself slightly aloof from the publication.
Meanwhile at the New Yorker, Dan Chiasson considers the relationship between Robert Lowell’s poetry and bipolar disorder in the wake of Kay Jamison’s recent book about the poet, Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character.
A group of poets and activists will hold a vigil for the National Endowment for the Arts this Wednesday in front of Trump Tower in New York City. Poets including Sam Sax, Rachel Zucker, and Yesenia Montilla will read. (Publishers Weekly)
“It is only when I hold myself to the standard of nonfiction that I am able to go all the way into the truth that I don’t want to look at.” Melissa Febos talks with the Los Angeles Review of Books about writing nonfiction versus fiction, anti-endings, and her new memoir, Abandon Me.
Robert James Waller, the author of the 1992 hit novel, The Bridges of Madison County, died on Friday at age seventy-seven. (Los Angeles Times)
Artist and writer Nana Oforiatta-Ayim has embarked on a project to archive both historical and contemporary arts across Africa in an encyclopedia, which will consist of fifty-four volumes, one for each country. (New York Times)
Miriam Tlali, the “mother of South African literature” and the first black woman from her country to publish a novel, died on Friday. (Southern Times)
