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 Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine have announced the eleven finalists for the 2019 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships. The fellowships are conferred to five poets between twenty-one and thirty-one years of age; each fellow receives $25,800. This year’s finalists are Noah Baldino, Franny Choi, Jane Huffman, Mia Kang, José Olivarez, Alan Pelaez Lopez, Julian Randall, Justin Phillip Reed, Monica Sok, Noah Warren, and Michael Wasson.
“We write dystopian stories to be cautionary tales, not instruction manuals.” Neal Shusterman and fellow novelists Marie Lu, Veronica Roth, and Ally Condie reflect on how the detention centers at the U.S. border embody the dire warnings of dystopian fiction. (Washington Post)
Sony Pictures Entertainment and HarperCollins Publishers have announced a partnership to produce films and content from the HarperCollins catalog. The venture will be led by former Fox 2000 studio executive Elizabeth Gabler, who previously oversaw the production of book-to-film adaptations such as Hidden Figures and The Devil Wears Prada. (Deadline)
For all those readers wondering which scent would go best with their books, this list of book and perfume pairings should see you through the summer. Interview matches Tarfia Faizullah’s poetry collection Registers of Illuminated Villages with “Jasmin Paradis” by Élisire and Amy Hempel’s story collection Sing to It with “Onda” by Vero Perfuma.
At the New Yorker, novelist Chia-Chia Lin describes impersonating the ultra-rich in China as part of her work for a consulting firm. “I had spent my whole childhood and young adulthood trying to be seen and accepted as American, and now here I was, swimming in the opposite direction, pretending not to be.”
Professor and researcher Arthur Jacobs has developed a machine learning tool that analyzes sentiment in literary texts, starting with Harry Potter. The tool, SentiArt, analyzed the personality profiles of the book’s main characters and “performed remarkably well in predicting the emotion potential of text passages.”
In Connecticut, an acclaimed writing program for female prisoners at York Correctional Institution has been suspended due to a dispute over a forthcoming anthology of essays by former and current workshop participants. Two contributors to the anthology have accused the program leader, best-selling author Wally Lamb, of bullying them and delaying payments. (Hartford Courant)
And at the New York Times, Kate Tuttle considers the booming true crime genre and its female audience. “My fascination springs from the same sources that have always drawn people to the genre: straightforward curiosity, vicarious thrills, and a kind of magical thinking that maybe if you consume crime as art you’ll never confront it in real life.”
