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
Poet Tony Hoagland has died. The author of eight books of poetry and two essay collections, Hoagland received a James Laughlin Award and the Jackson Poetry Prize, was a finalist for a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award, and received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He taught creative writing at the University of Houston and in the MFA program at Warren Wilson College. He was sixty-four. (Poetry Foundation)
At the New York Times, Tommy Orange reviews Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s debut story collection, Friday Black, a book “meant to be read right now, at the end of this year, as we inch ever closer to what feels like an inevitable phenomenal catastrophe or some other kind of radical change.”
Read more about Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah and the stories in Friday Black in a recent installment of Literary MagNet.
“We need to think about power just a bit differently. What happens when we have that power — when our ideas, our programs, our voices are central to the discourse, not adjacent or alternative to?” Patricia Spears Jones discusses the importance of turning to Black women poets like Pauli Murray, Audre Lorde, and June Jordan in dark times. (Electric Literature)
Marley Dias, an eleven-year-old activist and author, said she was “sick of reading about white boys and their dogs.” Three years ago she launched the #1000BlackGirlBooks campaign, aimed at highlighting children’s books that feature people of color as protagonists. Since then, Dias has collected more than 11,000 books for the project and is donating more than half of the collection to underserved communities in the United States, the United Kingdom, Ghana, and Haiti. (CNN)
“I came to realize that a book proposal is not a lofty, idealistic presentation of one’s brilliant idea, but rather a persuasive document meant to convince a publisher to spend their time—and, more to the point, their money—on your idea.” Joanna Ebenstein shares advice on writing an effective book proposal. (Creative Independent)
British novelist Sarah Perry talks to Vulture about her latest novel, Melmoth, a feminist reimagining of an 1820 gothic tale in which a man sells his soul to the devil.
“I decided to start something in part because I needed people to talk to. People who I thought were amazing.” The Los Angeles Review of Books profiles Danielle Dutton and her husband, Martin Riker, who cofounded Dorothy: A Publishing Project in 2010. The St. Louis–based feminist press has since published eighteen books, “each compact, beautiful, and surprising—every one of them spectacular.”
