Poets & Writers Magazine January/February 2020

Read the expanded versions of this year’s debut poets roundup, featuring related audio recordings, and Joy Baglio’s interview with author and bookseller Kelly Link. Listen to author readings and excerpts of books featured in Page One: Where New and Noteworthy Books Begin. Check out Writers Recommend, the online exclusive in which we ask authors to share books, art, music, writing prompts—anything and everything that has inspired them in their writing. Read Ten Questions, our weekly series of interviews with writers on the day their new books are published. Explore our archive featuring more than eighty authors to learn about their writing habits, what they learned during the publishing process, and more.…

SOME TIME AGO I WAS ASKED TO MODERATE A PANEL ON inspiration at the Kauai Writers Conference. No problem, I thought. All the panelists were best-selling authors, all brilliant writers: Christina Baker Kline, Meg Wolitzer, and Greg Iles. This was going to be easy, fun—inspiring even. I had met Kline before; last July she and I shared a stage with Lily King at Poets & Writers Live in Portland, Maine, and in Kauai we picked up right where we had left off, with a conversation about the inspiration for her next novel, Tin Ticket, during which she told a lovely anecdote about a book she had given her father, a book she found on his shelf after her mother died. Wolitzer too opened up about one of her influences—writer and…

Poets & Writers Magazine welcomes feedback from its readers. Please post a comment on select articles at www.pw.org, e-mail editor@pw.org, or write to Editor, Poets & Writers Magazine, 90 Broad Street, Suite 2100, New York, NY 10004. Letters accepted for publication may be edited for clarity and length. LETTERS Feedback from readers What an awe-inspiring conversation with Reginald Dwayne Betts (“Name a Song” by Mahogany L. Browne, November/December 2019). As a Black man who is sixteen years into a life sentence without parole, I find it refreshing to read the undeniable success story of a man who has walked the same roads I have traveled. His path wasn’t pretty and it wasn’t without battles, but Betts’s life is a shining example of the restorative power of change. As a prisoner, a technical college…

On Sundays at a community bookstore in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, a group of a dozen or so people, ranging from high school kids to retirees, gather to make nonfiction comics. The eight-week course was started in 2018 by writer, illustrator, and graphic novelist Ellen Lindner to encourage people from all backgrounds “who are generally interested in art but for whom comics is a new medium” to tell personal stories in a new way. During the classes students learn how to draft ideas, write a script, make mockups, ink, and color, drawing inspiration from works like Lynda Barry’s One Hundred Demons (Sasquatch Books, 2002) and Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing Is Monsters (Fantagraphics, 2017). The session ends with presentations of the students’ work from the course. Graphic-storytelling classes like…

ELENA GOUK ASSIAN is an arts writer who lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her most recent work appears in Artsy, Aperture, Lapham’s Quarterly, and the Nation. JONATHAN VATNER is a journalist and fiction writer living in Yonkers, New York. His first novel, Carnegie Hill, was published in August 2019, and his second, The Bridesmaids Union, is forthcoming in 2021. GIL A LYONS writes about mental health and social justice for the New York Times; O, the Oprah Magazine; Cosmopolitan; Salon; Vox; and other publications. Find her on Twitter, @gilalyons, and on her website, gilalyons.com. DANA ISOK AWA is the senior editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. JOY BAGLIO is a fiction writer whose short stories have appeared in Tin House, American Short Fiction, the Iowa Review, TriQuarterly, New Ohio Review, and elsewhere. She is…

“Ever since you were a boy, you’ve dreamt of being Kung Fu Guy.” Interior Chinatown (Pantheon, January 2020) by Charles Yu. Fourth book, second novel. Agent: Julie Barer. Editor: Tim O’Connell. Publicist: Josefine Kals. “today, i elect jonathan, eleven & already making roads out of water / young genius, blog writer, lil community activist, curls tight / as pinky swears, black as my nation” Homie (Graywolf Press, January 2020) by Danez Smith. Third book, poetry collection. Agent: None. Editor: Jeff Shotts. Publicist: Caroline Nitz. “That night, when Mrs. Chamberlain called, Emira could only piece together the words ‘… take Briar somewhere…’ and ‘… pay you double.’” Such a Fun Age (Putnam, December 2019) by Kiley Reid. First book, novel. Agent: Claudia Ballard. Editor: Sally Kim. Publicists: Elena Hershey and Ashley Hewlett. “Depending on…