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James Baldwin’s 1974 novel If Beale Street Could Talk has been adapted into a feature film directed by Barry Jenkins. Starring Stephan James, Regina King, and KiKi Layne, the film follows a young woman in 1970s Harlem attempting to prove her fiancé’s innocence when he is arrested for a crime he didn’t commit.
Sophie Mackintosh reads from her debut novel, The Water Cure (Doubleday, 2019), at Waterstones bookstore and talks about being influenced by Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel The Virgin Suicides, Yorgos Lanthimos’s film Dogtooth, Joan Lindsay’s novel Picnic at Hanging Rock, and the recent sociopolitical climate.
“What one carries from one point to another, geographically or temporally, is one’s self.” Yiyun Li reads from her debut memoir, Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life (Random House, 2017), in this video produced by the Office of Communications at Princeton University. Li, whose novel Where Reasons End is forthcoming from Random House in February, is featured in “Portraits of Inspiration” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“A story or a character should change. The events that happen change us.” George R. R. Martin, whose book Fire & Blood: 300 Years Before A Game of Thrones (Bantam, 2018) is a history of the Targaryen family from his fantasy novel series A Song of Fire and Ice, talks to John Hodgman about how the realness in Stan Lee’s comic books influenced him as a writer.
Anushah Jiwani graduated summa cum laude from Hendrix College with a BA in English–Creative Writing and International Relations. She is the 2018 recipient of the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award (WEX) for poetry sponsored by Poets & Writers. She took honors in the 2017 Southern Literary Festival Competition and won third place in the statewide 2017 Jeannie Dolan Carter Collegiate Poetry Contest sponsored by the Poets’ Roundtable of Arkansas. Jiwani also won the Fourth Annual Short Fiction Contest sponsored by the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum and Educational Center in 2017. Much of her writing centers on the duality of her Pakistani American identity and aims to provide a space for the immigrant voice.
In May of 2018, I found out that I was the recipient of Poets & Writers’ Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award for poetry. In addition to a generous honorarium and a reading, Joshua Idaszak, the winner for fiction, and I would get the chance to meet with editors, authors, and publishers in New York City. Bonnie Rose Marcus worked tirelessly to arrange meetings, and welcomed us with open arms in November.
What I learned: editors, publishers, literary agents—they’re all just ordinary people. They want to know about you, and it’s as easy as one simple conversation. This prize creates the opportunity for that conversation to happen, with generous support from the team at Poets & Writers.
Through these conversations, many things became clear: internal relationships mattered, there would be little money in poetry, literary agents wanted novels over short stories, small presses are dedicated to their authors, and within all this business, community around writing was a precious thing.
Among others, I chose to meet with Paolo Javier, who works tirelessly to create community and accessibility around writing at Poets House, and Sarah Gambito, cofounder of Kundiman, who is seeking holistic points of entry and multidisciplinary forms for audience engagement.
These poets have been motivated by lack of opportunity or equity in the writing world, and are trying to create honest spaces for established and growing writers. We talked about embracing rejections, finding the right MFA programs, expanding community programs, the discipline required for publishing one’s work, and our love for literature.
As a writer, I learned an incredible amount about the inner workings of the literary world through this trip. But what was more significant, personally, was being able to connect with other writers of color who shared their experiences about navigating and succeeding in this sphere.
The Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award is generously supported by Maureen Egen, a member of the Poets & Writers Board of Directors.
Photo: (left to right) Joshua Idaszak, 2018 WEX poetry judge Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Anushah Jiwani, R&W (east) director Bonnie Rose Marcus, R&W fellow Arriel Vinson, and R&W program assistant Ricardo Hernandez (Credit: Christian Rodriguez).“My frugal mouth spends the only foreign words it owns. / At present, on this sleeper train, there’s nowhere to arrive.” Jenny Xie, a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award in poetry, reads “Rootless” and “Ongoing” from her debut poetry collection, Eye Level (Graywolf Press, 2018). Xie is featured in “Wilder Forms: Our Fourteenth Annual Look at Debut Poets” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Josh Malerman talks about writing novels while touring with his band, incorporating performance and radio play elements into his book readings, and the inspiration behind his debut novel, Bird Box (Ecco, 2014), in this video from the 2015 Midwest Literary Walk. The novel has been adapted into a feature film directed by Susanne Bier and starring Sandra Bullock, John Malkovich, Sarah Paulson, and Trevante Rhodes.
Bird Box (Ecco, 2014), the debut novel by Josh Malerman has been adapted into a feature film. Directed by Susanne Bier, the psychological thriller film stars Sandra Bullock, John Malkovich, Sarah Paulson, and Trevante Rhodes and follows a woman and her two children as they traverse a post-apocalyptic landscape while blindfolded to escape an unseen, supernatural adversary.
“You’ve got to do two very contradictory things as a writer: you’ve got to enjoy spending a lot of time alone—and a lot of people don’t—and you’ve also got to go out and see about the world and immerse yourself in that world....” Irvine Welsh, whose latest novel, Dead Men’s Trousers, is forthcoming from Melville House in February, contemplates the words of wisdom and advice he would offer to young writers in this interview with Christian Lund for Louisiana Channel.
“I want to write about tiny miracles: I woke up this morning. I woke up this morning.” George Abraham, author of the chapbook The Specimen’s Apology (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2019), reads his poem “Against Consolidation” at the 2017 VOX POP Poetry Slam Tournament in Manchester, New Hampshire.
![Bird Box | Official Trailer [HD] | Netflix](https://www.pw.org/files/styles/video_thumb_medium/public/media-oembed/i.ytimg.com/vi/o2AsIXSh2xo/hqdefault.jpg?itok=7rovav10)
