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 Whiting Foundation has announced the six recipients of its annual $40,000 nonfiction grants [2].

In other award news, Kirkus Reviews has announced the eighteen finalists for its $50,000 annual prizes [3], given for books of fiction, nonfiction, and young adult literature published during the previous year.

OlaRonke Akinmowo shares why she started the Free Black Women’s Library [4], a mobile and interactive library of more than a thousand books written by Black women. (Hyperallergic)

“The point, she’s saying, is to last, to make love a habit, a collaboration that regenerates itself by doing, by staying together beyond the highs and lows of new passions or old regrets.” Hilton Als on Tracy K. Smith’s poetry [5]. (New Yorker)

Leslie Jamison describes spending a summer in Wales [6] writing a budget travel guide. (New York Times Magazine)

A collection of 180 letters from Hunter S. Thompson to his childhood friend Paul Semonin [7] will be put up for auction on Thursday with an opening price of $110,000. (Guardian)

B. D. McClay offers an appreciation of fiction’s secondary characters [8]. (Commonweal Magazine)

Veteran and journalist Elliot Ackerman talks about the “emotional transference” [9] in art and his new novel, Waiting for Eden. (NPR)