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Home > Maya Angelou’s Ninetieth Birthday, Roxane Gay’s Pop-Up Magazine, and More

Maya Angelou’s Ninetieth Birthday, Roxane Gay’s Pop-Up Magazine, and More [1]

by
Staff
4.4.18

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:

The late Maya Angelou would have been ninety today. To celebrate the author’s birthday, TIME highlights five facts about Angelou [2]—she was the first black female conductor of a San Francisco cable car, for example—and Google features an animated video of Angelou, Oprah Winfrey, Alicia Keys, America Ferrera, and others reading Angelou’s poem “Still I Rise” as a Google Doodle [3].

Roxane Gay is curating a pop-up magazine at Medium to “create a space for writers I respect and admire to contribute to the ongoing conversation about unruly bodies [4] and what it means to be human,” starting with essays by Randa Jarrar, S. Bear Bergman, Matthew Salesses, and Kiese Laymon.

Joan Silber has won the 2018 PEN/Faulkner Award [5] for her novel Improvement, which also won the 2017 National Book Critics Circle award in fiction. Silber will receive $15,000. (Washington Post)

The New York Times Magazine reports on the Chinese government’s crackdown on booksellers in Hong Kong [6], especially those selling banned books.

 “…King’s legacy is not static. Five decades later, it continues to deepen and unfold.” On the fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination [7], the New Yorker rounds up its coverage of the legendary civil rights leader over the decades.

Paul Bogaards, the executive director of publicity at Knopf/Doubleday, posted an official job listing for a publicist on the Penguin Random House website and then wrote a rather unconventional listing [8] of the job for his blog. “You will attend meetings where nothing happens. That is another succinct description of book publishing in the twenty-first century.”

In response to writer Whit Reynolds’s Twitter challenge [9] over the weekend for women to “describe yourself like a male author would,” Katy Waldman considers the “ridiculousness that ensues when bookish men perform interest in women’s inner lives [10] out of a misbegotten sense of nobility.” (New Yorker)

Poet J. Jennifer Espinoza talks with the Creative Independent [11] about creative process, protecting one’s mental and physical health while writing and being on social media, and how to deal with creative blocks.


Source URL:https://www.pw.org/content/maya_angelous_ninetieth_birthday_roxane_gays_popup_magazine_and_more

Links
[1] https://www.pw.org/content/maya_angelous_ninetieth_birthday_roxane_gays_popup_magazine_and_more [2] http://time.com/5226045/maya-angelou-birthday-google-doodle/ [3] https://www.google.com/doodles/dr-maya-angelous-90th-birthday [4] https://medium.com/s/unrulybodies/the-body-is-unruly-15fa352904cf [5] https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/joan-silbers-improvement-wins-penfaulkner-award-for-fiction/2018/04/03/ffb361ca-3367-11e8-8bdd-cdb33a5eef83_story.html?utm_term=.9129920d905e [6] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/03/magazine/the-case-of-hong-kongs-missing-booksellers.html [7] https://www.newyorker.com/books/double-take/martin-luther-king-jr-in-the-new-yorker [8] http://paulbogaards.tumblr.com/post/172350356897/im-looking-to-hire-a-publicist-actual-job [9] https://twitter.com/whitneyarner/status/980330317247545349 [10] https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/how-women-see-how-male-authors-see-them [11] https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/j-jennifer-espinoza-on-the-shared-experience-of-poetry/