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 Hurston/Wright Foundation has announced the winners of its annual Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards [2], which honor Black authors from the United States and around the world. Africaville by Jeffrey Colvin won for debut fiction, A Tall History of Sugar by Curdella Forbes won for fiction, Exiles of Eden by Ladan Osman won for poetry, and Solitary by Albert Woodfox won for nonfiction. (Literary Hub)
The Center for Fiction has established a new award to honor the memory of editor and publisher Susan Kamil [3], who died in September [4]. The Susan Kamil Award for Emerging Writers will support the organization’s existing Emerging Writer Fellowship Program. (Publishers Weekly)
Despite objections from the local community, Dublin City Council has approved a plan that will transform the house from James Joyce’s short story “The Dead” [5] into a hostel. A campaign group against the development, supported by writers such as Sally Rooney and Colm Tóibín, plans to file an appeal. (Guardian)
Former U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith has announced she will no longer host The Slowdown [6]. The poetry podcast will go on hiatus until the production team recruits a new host. “It has meant the world to me to share the practice of listening to, and feeling the power of poems with you here on The Slowdown,” says Smith.
Alexis Okeowo profiles Saidiya Hartman [7] for the New Yorker, charting the writer’s monumental contributions to Black studies. “I wanted to understand the inequality that was structuring the world—even as I was feeling that it had not made anything impossible for me,” says Hartman.
“Lucille Clifton’s spirit writing makes the pangs of my own embodiment as a Black woman easier to bear amid constant reminders of the perils of Black embodiment.” Marina Magloire writes about Lucille Clifton’s access to the spirit world [8]. (Paris Review Daily)
Filmmaker Barry Jenkins has shared the first trailer for his television adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad [9].
Financial Times spotlights Schomburg Shop [10], the bookstore and gift shop that operates within the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a division of the New York Public Library.