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 stories:
Yesterday the National Book Foundation announced the launch of the National Book Award for Translated Literature [2], which will be given annually for a work of fiction or nonfiction translated into English. (New York Times)
Today is World Read Aloud Day [3], an annual event founded by LitWorld to celebrate literacy as a human right. At the Washington Post, book critic Ron Charles describes reading books aloud to his wife for the past thirty years [4].
To mark Black History Month, which starts today, Penguin Classics is reprinting W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1903 essay collection, The Souls of Black Folk, and five Harlem Renaissance novels [5], including Nella Larsen’s Passing and Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry. (NPR)
An artificial intelligence researcher has written a book about the science of swearing [6]—how swearing impacts the credibility of the speaker, as well as how gender influences the perception of curses. (Smithsonian)
Atlas Obscura rounds up the literary maps [7] featured in a new exhibit at Harvard’s Houghton Library, “Landmarks: Maps as Literary Illustration.”
Weike Wang talks about the similarities between writing and science, pushing against Asian American stereotypes [8], and her debut novel, Chemistry. (Margins)
Australian writer Sarah Krasnostein won $125,000 Australian at the Victorian Premier Literary Awards [9] last night for her memoir, The Trauma Cleaner. (Guardian)
In honor of the late Muriel Spark’s hundredth birthday [10] today, the New Yorker has posted recordings of the writer reading from her memoir, Curriculum Vitae, and her novel The Public Image.