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 storie
You can now contribute to poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera’s new nationwide poetry project, La Casa de Colores. On the Library of Congress website, submit up to two hundred characters on a specified theme—this month’s theme is “family.” At the close of Herrera’s laureateship, the poetry submissions will be combined to form an epic poem representative of the diverse voices that make up the United States. (PBS NewsHour)
“I was surprised by how repeatedly I was asked to whitewash the story, to make my book seem more relatable to audiences, as if none of those audiences had people like me in them.” Novelist Mira Jacob shares her experience of being ignored as a writer of color in the publishing industry. (BuzzFeed)
The Guardian features five young, London-based poets who write and speak out about the refugee experience in Europe. In her poem “Home,” Warsan Shire—who was born in Nairobi, Kenya, and raised in London—writes: “no one puts their children in a boat / unless the water is safer than the land.”
A film adaptation of Martin Amis’s best-known novel, London Fields, screens tonight at the Toronto International Film Festival. In advance of the premiere, Amis discusses adapting novels for the screen and the current state of literature. (New Republic)
Over at Literary Hub, Alexander Chee examines the challenges of marketing and promotion that authors face in the social media age, using Elena Ferrante’s anonymity as a counter-example. “Elena Ferrante does not care if you want to be her friend…. There is no Twitter feed where she might make gaffes, or get into online battles…. There’s just a row of books executed with intellect and bravura, and the rest, hidden behind a name.”
“I found [the character] Jude an infuriating object of attention, but resisted blaming the victim. I blame the author.” Christian Lorentzen offers a dissenting view of the widely praised novel A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, which is shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and longlisted for the National Book Award in Fiction. (London Review of Books)
Meanwhile, now that all of the National Book Awards longlists have been announced, you can learn more about the forty nominees through this list of adjectives used to describe each of them. (Slate)
Question of the day: Is Dennis Cooper’s series of fifty GIFs a novel? (Paste)
