Image Credit: Jon Rou
Earlier this week, the Library of Congress announced it was reappointing Natasha Trethewey as the nation’s poet laureate. That mostly means one thing: more work.
But that work — discussing poetry and, soon, traveling around the country with PBS Newshour — is the whole point. We spoke with Trethewey about her recent reappointment, her upcoming national project with PBS (expect more details by the end of the summer), and more.
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Image Credit: Jon Rou
The nation’s top poet is staying put. According to the AP, Natasha Trethewey has been reappointed poet laureate, entering her second year, the Library of Congress will announce Monday.
Trethewey is coming off a busy year as the first Southern laureate since Robert Penn Warren. She released a new collection, Thrall, last August, while continuing as a professor at Emory University. (That’s on top of her 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Native Guard.) In her second term, which officially begins in September, Trethewey will reportedly collaborate with PBS on reports “about poetry and society.”
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The recipients of the 2013 Pulitzer Prizes, the highly prestigious awards administered by Columbia University each year, were announced on Monday. Honorees for the book awards include stories that range from topical tales of North Korea-U.S. relations to the timeless subject of failed marriages.
The prize for fiction went to The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson, which EW gave an “A” upon its release in early 2012 and later listed among the year’s best fiction. The novel takes place in North Korea, chronicling the life of a man named Pak Jun Do, from his childhood in a state orphanage through a series of adventures and struggles amid rising tensions between North Korea and the U.S. READ FULL STORY »
The 2012 National Book Award winners were announced tonight during a blacktie gala at Cipriani’s in Lower Manhattan. Winning the big fiction prize was Louise Erdrich for her gut-wrenching novel The Round House, which centers on a grave injustice that rocks a Native American community. In a turn that didn’t surprise us whatsoever, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Katherine Boo won for her stunning work of nonfiction, Behind the Beautiful Forevers. David Ferry and William Alexander also won big in Poetry and Young People’s Literature, respectively. See below for a full list of finalists with winners in bold, and click on links for the EW reviews. READ FULL STORY »
Amanda Nadelberg’s poems in her new collection Bright Brave Phenomena (Coffee House Press) are jumping, funny, romantic, and frequently lyrical. She repeats words within a stanza, looping back to what you can later recognize as a theme, but which in the immediate reading is almost pure music:
Some things
will always look
like this. We had
a lovely time and
a deep chair. Ugly
speaks to Lovely
and somewhere
else people make
terrible histories.
Intolerable love. READ FULL STORY »
Joe Brainard (1941-1994) was a marvelous artist – a painter whose work, including his collages and drawings, revealed a shrewdly intelligent man who was able to tap into a naif’s youthful innocence, a sharpie’s wit, and a commercial creator’s uniquely sophisticated sense of design. Brainard was also a sometime-writer whose words (and some art) have been collected in a “special publication” from The Library of America as The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard. READ FULL STORY »
If, starting with its title, Michael Robbins’ debut poetry collection Alien vs. Predator seems like a book custom-designed for the Entertainment Weekly audience – its verse studded with mostly-jovial references to Michael J. Fox, Eddie Van Halen, CSI: Miami, and a dedication to Alex Chilton – Robbins is also doing some seriously entertaining poetry work over the course of this volume; it ain’t all Boba Fett and Ghostface Killah. READ FULL STORY »
Image Credit: David Corio/Michael Ochs Archive/Getty Images
Poet Adrienne Rich, whose socially conscious verse influenced a generation of feminist, gay rights and anti-war activists, has died. She was 82.
Rich died Tuesday at her Santa Cruz home from complications from rheumatoid arthritis, said her son, Pablo Conrad. She had lived in Santa Cruz since the 1980s.
Through her writing, Rich explored topics such as women’s rights, racism, sexuality, economic justice and love between women.
Rich published more than a dozen volumes of poetry and five collections of nonfiction. She won a National Book Award for her collection of poems Diving into the Wreck in 1974. In 2004, she won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for her collection The School Among the Ruins.
She had first gained national prominence with her third poetry collection, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, in 1963. Citing the title poem, University of Maryland professor Rudd Fleming wrote in The Washington Post that she “proves poetically how hard it is to be a woman — a member of the second sex.” READ FULL STORY »
Despite wild rumors that Bob Dylan was the favorite to win, the Swedish Academy awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize for literature to one of their own, surrealist poet Tomas Tranströmer, who has been a long-time favorite to win the $1.5 million honor. The judges praised Tranströmer’s work for its “condensed translucent images” which give readers “fresh access to reality.” Born in Stockholm in 1931, he published his first poetry collection, 17 Dikter (“17 Poems”) while still in college at the University of Stockholm. His collections, which explore his native country and other regions of the world, include Hemligheter på vägen (1958), Klangar och spår (1966), and Östersjöar (1974).
The Guardian notes that Tranströmer is the eighth European to be awarded the Nobel, the world’s most prestigious literary honor, in the past ten years.
Amazon announced yesterday that it will offer library lending capabilities for the Kindle, but is there a catch? Key details remain fuzzy, or pixilated: When will libraries roll out the program, and how long will the lending period be? Also, not all books may be available as part of the program.
Intrepid photojournalist and Restrepo co-director Tim Hetherington, who was killed in Libya yesterday, had published a book in 2009 called Long Story Bit by Bit: Liberia Retold. According to the publisher, the book ”entwines documentary photography, oral testimony, and memoir to map the dynamics of power, tragedy and triumph in Liberia’s recent history. It depicts a past of rebel camps, rainforest destruction, Charles Taylor’s trial as a war criminal, and other happenings contrasted with the hope for the future.”
Funnylady Tina Fey has to keep herself entertained while on her Bossypants promotional tour, so she’s been mixing it up while signing book after book. As she mentioned on Tuesday night’s Conan, she sometimes signs entirely different names (like Ina Garten) in fans’ books and at least once has inscribed, “Help, I’m stuck in a Korean Tina Fey autograph factory!” Maybe by the time her book tour is over, she really will have those man arms.
Do you know what’s truly dead? Spouting off little soundbytes about how books and traditional publishing are dead. Check out these common 21st century nuggets on non-wisdom that really should be put to rest.
The Long Island mansion believed to have inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald in writing The Great Gatsby was demolished earlier this week, but not before writer Christine Lee Zilka snapped some final photos of the home that had been standing since 1902.
Two anthologies have been marketing classic poetry to children along gender lines. Are some poems for boys and others for girls?
