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It was truly inevitable that publishing folks would get a hold of this particular meme. And so, here we have it: "(The Inevitable) Sh*t Agents and Editors Say," starring agents Michelle Brower and Brandi Bowles and editor Katie McHugh.
Melville House wonders when publishers will speak out about Amazon; New York City's Algonquin Hotel announced that when it reopens this spring after a renovation, the famed Oak Room will be gone; E. B. White answers a charge levied by the ASPCA; and more
Kepler's Books has been operating in Menlo Park, California, since 1955. After the recent retirement of Clark Kepler, a group of people committed to the bookstore's place in the community came together to start the process of imagining what the future of Kepler's will look like. The vision, as discussed in this video, combines a nonprofit model that can offer literary events with a community-owned bookstore that will preserve the physical space.
Starting yesterday, forty-year-old literary journal Ploughshares began accepting entries for a new writing contest open to unpublished poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers.
The Emerging Writer's Contest, an expansion of last year's inaugural competition in fiction, will award one thousand dollars and publication to a writer in each genre.
In order to be considered "emerging," writers should not have published a book or chapbook in any form (self-published works included). Ploughshares invites potential entrants with eligibility questions to inquire via e-mail.
Poets may submit between three and five poems and prose writers may submit works of up to five thousand words along with a twenty-dollar entry fee, which includes a subscription to Ploughshares, until April 2. For complete guidelines and to access the submission manager, visit the journal's website.
The winner of the first contest was thirty-six-year-old Thomas Lee, for his story "The Gospel of Blackbird," which appears in the current issue of the magazine, alongside fiction by James Franco, William Giraldi, Ann Hood, and Rachel Kadish. Sample works from the issue, guest edited by Alice Hoffman, are accessible online.
Nobel prize-winning poet Wislawa Szymborska, as well as Surrealist artist and poet Dorothea Tanning, passed away yesterday in their respective countries; novelist Paul Auster has engaged in a war of words with Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister of Turkey; Open Letters Monthly examines the hidden life of Virginia Woolf's institutionalized half-sister, Laura Makepeace Stephen; and other news.
How many times have you been to a poetry reading that sounds like this? Here are some helpful and hilarious tips on how not to read your poetry, from the Fishbowl Improv group.
The Claremont Graduate University has announced the winners of this year's Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Awards, two of the more lucrative honors in the genre. The one-hundred-thousand-dollar Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, given to a writer in midcareer, went to New York City poet Timothy Donnelly for his second collection, The Cloud Corporation (Wave Books). Donnelly, whose first book, Twenty-seven Props for a Production of "Eine Lebenszeit," was published in 2003 by Grove Press, has also published widely in journals such as A Public Space, the Nation, and the Paris Review.
Debut poet Katherine Larson of Tucson, Arizona, received the ten-thousand-dollar Kate Tufts Discovery Award for Radial Symmetry (Yale University Press). Larson's book was published in 2011 as the winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize the previous year, selected by Louise Glück.
The finalists for the Kingsley Tufts prize were Ed Roberson for To See the Earth Before the End of the World (Wesleyan University Press) and Christian Wiman for Every Riven Thing (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Finalists for the debut award were Julie Hanson for Unbeknownst (University of Iowa Press) and Shane McCrae for Mule (Cleveland State University Poetry Center).
Serving as the final judges for the award were poets David Barber, Kate Gale, Ted Genoways, Linda Gregerson, and Carl Phillips. The preliminary judges were poets Jericho Brown, Andrew Feld, and Suji Kwock Kim.
The winners will be feted on April 19 at a ceremony in Claremont, California, presided over by poet Maxine Hong Kingston.
The video below was filmed at Donnelly's Cloud Corporation release party at the offices of A Public Space in Brooklyn, New York.
GalleyCat reports adult hardcover sales were down in November; Oxford professor of poetry Geoffrey Hill offers choice words for the United Kingdom's poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy; Sherman Alexie responds to a ban of ethnic studies in Tucson classrooms; and other news.
Read the headlines in today's newspaper. Choose one that you find compelling, and without reading the accompanying article, write a story based on the headline.
Chinese activist Zhu Yufu is facing a prison sentence for a poem he circulated on the Internet; Melville House ponders if James Franco's forthcoming novel will be a bestseller; eighteen days before Charles Bukowski died, he faxed a poem to his publisher; and other news.
