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 winner of this year’s T. S. Eliot Prize is C+nto & Othered Poems by Joelle Taylor, which chair of the judges Glyn Maxwell praised as a “blazing book of rage and light, a grand opera of liberation from the shadows of indifference and oppression.” Administered by the T. S. Eliot Foundation, the prize is open to poetry collections published in the U.K. or Ireland and comes with a purse of £25,000 (approximately $34,357). (Guardian)
Roxane Gay has partnered with Substack to launch the Joel Gay Creative Fellowships, named in honor of her late brother. Three writers will receive a $25,000 stipend to develop and publish a Substack newsletter. Each fellow will also meet with Gay monthly and receive up to $15,000 in services from Substack, such as editorial support and design assistance. (Literary Hub)
Paul Bogaards is venturing into independent publicity right on the heels of his retirement from Knopf, where he served as executive vice president, publishing and marketing, and deputy publisher. At his new firm, Bogaards Public Relations LLC, he will “help writers broaden their readership through careful analysis of their work and by developing long arc campaigns for their books and identities.” (Shelf Awareness)
Later this year the personal collection of rare book dealer William Reese, who died in 2018, will go up for auction and is expected to fetch between $12 million and $18 million. Among the most valuable items is a broadside printing of the Declaration of Independence. (New York Times)
The U.K. arm of the online retailer Bookshop recently surpassed a total of £2 million (approximately $2.7 million) in money earned for independent bookstores. This figure includes bookstore-specific commissions and money from a shared pool. (Bookseller)
“The problem of a name in America is the problem of the American experiment in microcosm: How to shove the world’s phonetics and conventions into mouths and minds that consider Anglo whiteness and the English language to be the default.” Thu-Huong Ha considers the history, politics, and lived reality of names in the United States. (Believer)
“The poems are structured almost like a house, and language mediates who’s allowed to come into that house.” Antonio De Jesús López, the author of Gentefication, considers the different ways in which poetry mirrors real life. (Rumpus)
“These astonishing women are using their words and their platforms—their power—to open our eyes, awaken our senses, and deepen our understanding of each other and the society we live in.” Oprah Daily spotlights eight accomplished women writers, including Lan Samantha Chang and Imani Perry.
