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:

“Our notion of genius as an individual nature fits well with the dominant Western fantasy of the author as a romantic loner, which also helps to excuse the various kinds of bad behavior that writers are sometimes guilty of.” Pulitzer Prize–winning fiction writer Viet Thanh Nguyen [2] troubles the idea of the Western “genius” and what this means for Asian American writers. (New York Times)

At the Paris Review blog, fiction and nonfiction writer Nafissa Thompson-Spires discusses living and writing with a chronic illness [3], and the anxiety and importance of telling difficult illness narratives. Listen to Thompson-Spires read from her new story collection, Heads of the Colored People [4], as part of the Page One author reading series.

Five women publishing professionals, including Terese Marie Mailhot, Meredith Talusan, Ijeoma Oluo, Kathryn Belden, and Kima Jones [5], have a conversation about the growing popularity of books about race, gender, and sexual identity [6]. (BuzzFeed Reader)

Nacima Qorane, a Somaliland poet, has been sentenced to three years [7] in jail for reciting poetry calling for Somaliland to reunite with Somalia. (BBC News)

The finalists for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award [8] have been announced. The $10,000 award is given annually for a novel or story collection by a writer under the age of thirty-five.

In more prize news, on Friday poet Danez Smith won the inaugural Four Quartets Prize [9], a $20,000 award sponsored by the T. S. Eliot Foundation and Poetry Society of America for a unified and complete sequence of poems.

Prepare for a literary summer with this list of thirty books [10] published in June, July, and August, including new fiction from Lauren Groff, a memoir from Porochista Khakpour, and poetry from Terrance Hayes. (Elle)