Women Writing About the Wild, Translation Database Finds New Home, and More

by
Staff
1.12.18

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:

From Susan Fenimore Cooper and Gene Stratton-Porter to Elena Passarello and Amy Liptrot, Outside recommends twenty-five women writing about the wild that everyone should read.

“So poetry and theatre do the work of telling not only about our history but about the lived moment, the particular moment that we’re in, in a way that rises above all the noise of increasingly uncivil discourse and division.” Natasha Trethewey talks about the public role of the poet, reckoning with Confederate history, and the theatrical adaptation of her poetry collection Native Guard. (American Theater)

Open Letter’s translation database has found a new home at Publishers Weekly. The database tracks original publications of fiction and poetry published in the United States in English translation.

Historian Randall Hansen has sold out copies of his book Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany 1942–1945, most likely due to people mistaking it for Michael Wolff’s new book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, which caused a media uproar last week. “I’m tempted to buy Wolff a bottle of champagne,” says Hansen. (NPR)

Cave Canem, an organization that works to promote African American poets, has received a $100,000 grant from the Brooklyn Community Foundation.

To read more about Cave Canem, read a Q&A with the organization’s executive director, Nicole Sealey, from the May/June 2017 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

The New York Times profiles poets Alex Dimitrov and Dorothea Lasky and their popular astrology Twitter account, Astro Poets.

Self-professed bookworms Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerburg have released a list of recommended books, including Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined and Liu Cixin’s sci-fi novel The Three-Body Problem. (Guardian, World Economic Forum)

Salon interviews Stefan Merrill Block, Chloe Benjamin, Naima Coster, Jamie Quatro, and Nathaniel Rich about their new books, all out this month.