The Writer's News

Reprinted from the December 2007 issue of the Writer's Chronicle.

Award To Hollander Polarizes Poetry Society Of America

After voting to award the Frost Medal, an annual award, to John Hollander, the board of the Poetry Society of America (PSA) erupted into fulminations that led to the resignations of board members. Some of the board members objected that the award was being given to Hollander, who had often bemoaned that multiculturalism and the politicization of academe was lowering literary standards. Writing in the New York Time Book Review, Hollander had referred to “cultures without literatures—West African, Mexican, and Central American.” And in an interview on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” a reporter paraphrased Mr. Hollander as contending “there isn’t much quality work coming from nonwhite poets today.” Other board members said that Hollander had been misquoted, maligned, and misunderstood, and that Hollander’s poetry should be judged on its own merits. The president of the board, William Louis-Dreyfus, accused the protesting board members of McCarthyism and excessive reactionary fervor. Rafael Campo, Elizabeth Alexander, and Mary Jo Salter objected to Louis-Dreyfus’s handling of the situation. Alexander, Salter, and Campo resigned from PSA’s board in September; and then Louis-Dreyfus resigned from the board as well. Ruth Kaplan has become the new President of PSA.

Doris Lessing Wins the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature

The $1.6 million prize was won by the Briton, who was born in Persia (Iran), raised in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), and now resides in London. The soon-to-be eighty-eight author never finished high school. She has written dozens of books of fiction and many plays. She has also penned nonfiction and an autobiography. She is the eleventh woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. (The other ten are: 1909: Selma Lagerlöf, 1926: Grazia Deledda, 1928: Sigrid Undset, 1938: Pearl S. Buck, 1945: Gabriela Mistral, 1966: Nelly Sachs, 1991: Nadine Gordimer, 1993: Toni Morrison, 1996: Wislawa Szymborska, and 2004: Elfriede Jelinek.) Ms. Lessing’s breakthrough novel, which inspired a generation of feminists, was The Golden Notebook. The Swedish Academy, in its citation said, “The burgeoning feminist movement saw it as a pioneering work and it belongs to the handful of books that informed the 20th-century view of the male-female relationship.” Other novels by Ms. Lessing include: The Grass is Singing, The Good Terrorist, Love Again, and The Cleft, published this past July by HarperCollins.

House Republicans Introduce a Draft Bill to Reauthorize the Higher Education Act (HEA)

The bill will authorize a Pell Grant maximum of $6,000, will eliminate the loan auction pilot program recently passed in the reconciliation bill, and will adopt a single definition of “institution of higher education” that will lump nonprofit and for-profit colleges together. House Democrats have not introduced a draft HEA yet.
The Senate, in July of this year, had unanimously approved their version of the HEA, reauthorizing the Higher Education Act (HEA) after unanimously adopting one modified amendment aimed at preventing institutions from using federal funds to pay for lobbying efforts. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Senate education committee Chairman Edward Kennedy (D-MA) worked together to modify Coburn’s amendment that prohibits institutions from using federal student aid funds or federal earmark funds to pay for lobbying efforts.
According to Senator Kennedy, the modified amendment will penalize institutions for using federal funds for lobbying without hampering their ability to conduct appropriate communications with policymakers and federal agencies. This legislation received unanimous bipartisan support in the Committee.

WBAI Radio Retreats out of Fear

A New York Times editorial states that WBAI, the flagship radio of “cocky resistance to government excess,” will not risk a 50th anniversary broadcast of the late poet Allen Ginsberg’s recording of “Howl.” The station fears that the Federal Communications Commission will issue a obscenity fine that might be large enough to bankrupt the “small-budget” station. Allen Ginsberg was known for his bardic powers, who according to the editorial, “reigned as the raucous poet of American hippiedom and as a literary pioneer.” His masterwork “Howl” won a landmark censorship trial against the government fifty years ago. In this effort at self-censorship, WBAI is not alone. Public broadcasting stations are also editing their documentaries, removing four-letter words from their programming.

A New Award for an AWP Award Winner

M. Evelina Galang’s One Tribe,  which won the 2004 AWP Award Series Prize for the Novel, has now won the Global Filipino Literary Award for Fiction published by Western Michigan University in 2006. The Library of Congress will issue One Tribe a special catalog number for inclusion in the Global Filipino Literary Awards Collection housed permanently in the Library’s Asian Reading Room. One Tribe was published by New Issues Press.

Stuart Dybek wins the MacArthur Award

A Distinguished Writer in Residence at Northwestern University, Stuart Dybek has won the $500,000 stipend which will be paid out in equal quarterly installments over five years. The author of three short story collections, numerous anthologized works of short fiction, and two books of poetry, Stuart Dybek lives in and writes about Chicago. Dybek’s three books of fiction are Childhood and Other Neighborhoods (1980), The Coast of Chicago (1990), and I Sailed with Magellan (2003). His two collections of poetry are, Brass Knuckles (1979) and Streets in Their Own Ink (2004).

Thousands of Words Shed Hyphens

The pressure of the Internet age has resulted in about 16,000 words losing their hyphens according to a Reuters report by Simon Rabinovitch. Bumble-bee is now bumblebee, ice-cream is ice cream, pot-belly is pot belly, and cry-baby is crybaby. Graphic designers do not like hyphens also because it makes a word more bulky. According to this report, “Researchers examined a corpus of more than 2 billion words, consisting of full sentences that appeared in newspapers, books, websites and blogs from 2000 onwards.” Some other words that were formerly hphenated, but are now split in two are: fig leaf, hobby horse, pin money, test tube, and water bed. Words that were formerly hyphenated but are now unified are:  bumblebee, chickpea, crybaby, leapfrog, logjam, lowlife, pigeonhole, touchline, and waterborne.

Oprah Winfrey’s Latest Selection

Gabriel García Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera is Winfrey’s latest book club selection. This is the second time she has chosen Marquez; his One Hundred Years of Solitude was a book club selection in 2004. About her latest selection, the New York Times has reported Winfrey as saying, “It is so beautifully written that it really takes you to another place in time and will make you ask yourself how long could you or would you wait for love.” A film adaptation of this book will be released soon. It is directed by Mike Newell and stars Javier Bardem and Benjamin Bratt. Winfrey hopes that her viewers will read the book before seeing the movie. It is the story of a woman and two men in 1985 and an unrequited love that spans fifty years.

Callaloo celebrates its 30th Anniversary at Johns Hopkins

Callaloo celebrated its 30th anniversary with a conference filled with poetry and fiction readings, lectures, conversations, and panel discussions. Hosted by the university’s Center for Africana Studies, the conference launched the journal into the next thirty years. Participating creative writers and scholars who read and engaged in public discussions on writing creative texts and the culture from which they derive included Carole Boyce Davies, Lucille Clifton, Thadious Davis, Brent Edwards, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Thomas Glave, Farah Griffin, Trudier Harris, Yusef Komunyakaa, Wahneema Lubiano, John McCluskey, Mark Anthony Neal, Carl Phillips, Tracy K. Smith and Natasha Trethewey. The conference was co-sponsored by The Reginald F. Lewis Museum and The Enoch Pratt Free Library.

British Readers Forsake Good Novels for Mysteries and Gory Thrillers

According to a report in The Raw Story, publishers at the Frankfurt Book Fair are bemoaning the fact that British readers are not very interested in the literary novel. And it is the women, who want more blood, gore, and suspense from their authors along with the romance. According to David Shelly, a publisher with Little Brown, British women drive the market as they read more than the men do. Densely plotted novels seem to make a more gratifying and effortless read. Very much like Oprah’s book club pick, a nod on the British television program “Richard and Judy” helps the literary novelist. And of course, the Man Booker Prize never fails. The British novel is also losing its “Britishness” as authors with foreign roots are growing up. On the bright side, British authors are read in the original in Holland, Germany, and France. Sometimes the readers buy the translation and the original so they complement each other.

October/November 2007 News

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