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.
Bloomsbury has announced it will reimburse staff [2] who took pay cuts during the early months of the pandemic. “Staff at Bloomsbury have been incredible during the pandemic. This has led to a much better than expected result, our highest first half since 2008,” said CEO Nigel Newton. Settling up with seven hundred and fifty employees, the company will issue nearly £700,000 in repayments. (Bookseller)
Joan Bingham [3], who helped orchestrate the merger of Grove Weidenfeld and the Atlantic Monthly Press to create Grove Atlantic, died on Saturday at age eighty-five. She served as an executive editor for the press for nearly three decades, acquiring across all genres and overseeing the Grove Press Poetry Series. (New York Times)
Fred Klein [4], who led Bantam Books as both an editor and marketer, died on October 22 at age ninety-seven. Described by his friend Richard Hunt as “the greatest ringmaster the publishing world has ever known,” Klein was known as a pioneer of successful mass-market paperback promotion. (Publishers Weekly)
“The conditions of the estate—poor public housing, poor design—did have the knock-on effect of being quite dark. But the young people within it are joyous and full of imagination.” Caleb Femi talks to the Guardian about representing his childhood community in the photographs and poems of his debut collection [5], Poor.
“He’s alive at the end of the book and he’s learned some lessons, but I thought that he didn’t fully understand everything that had happened to him.” Viet Thanh Nguyen talks to the Los Angeles Times about deciding to write The Committed, the sequel to his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel [6], The Sympathizer.
Hafizah Geter has joined Janklow & Nesbit Associates [7] as an agent. Most recently she served as an editor at Little A and Topple Books; she is also the author of the poetry collection Un-American.
“I began to understand that dusk is not the unilateral event I’d thought it was. It’s more like a process—a slow, silent wave.” Writer Pamela Petro muses on the nature of dusk [8]. (Guernica)
“I live in an overpopulated microregion in a previously depopulated country and my city is a hero-city and there is blood in the snow.” Valzhyna Mort writes on growing up in Minsk, Belarus [9]. (Literary Hub)
Mort appears in this week’s installment of Ten Questions [10] from Poets & Writers Magazine.