WE WRITERS tend not to give rejection the love or respect it deserves. We speak ill of it, as if it’s a malevolent demon, a destructive force, an uninvited guest that ruins our party. We revile it. We curse it. We reject it. Because rejection is a da

WALLACE STEVENS AWARD Rita Dove of Charlottesville, Virginia, won the 2019 Wallace Stevens Award. She received $100,000. The Academy’s Board of Chancellors judged. The annual award is given to a poet to “recognize outstanding and proven mastery in th

POETS & WRITERS MAGAZINE ANNOUNCES application information for writers conferences, literary festivals, residencies, and colonies of interest to poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers. Applications for the following events are due sh

The year 2020 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Poets & Writers. As we look back on a half century of service to writers—and forward to decades more of bringing you the inspiration, information, and guidance you count on from Poets & Writers Magazine

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 goin

FOR our fifteenth annual look at debut poetry, we chose ten poets whose first books struck us with their formal imagination, distinctive language, and deep attention to the world. The books, all published in 2019, inhabit a range of poetic modes. The

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

No but wait you’re the water—from “Willing in the Orisha” HOW IT BEGAN: In my MFA program at Bard, Ann Lauterbach asked me, “Are you representing or presenting?” And I wanted to see if I could present Blackness both in theory and in practice without

“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, elev

language first my learned isecondsee seefor mistaken am i nativego i everywhere—from “poem to be read from right to left” HOW IT BEGAN: Wanting to bear witness to the experience my family went through in immigrating, wanting to find others who had si

In September 2019 the creative writing program at Boise State University announced the closing of Ahsahta Press, a lauded poetry publisher housed at and subsidized by the Idaho university and led by director and editor Janet Holmes, a member of the c

It was earth that taught menames for all the planets, how to lookat an angle for the hummingbird,dark satellite of sugar in the blossom’s mouth.I could picture that vast absence of us,moons spinning coolly in unscripted pasts.—from “American Faith” H

Fight of the Century: Writers Ref lect on 100 Years of Landmark ACLU Cases (Avid Reader Press, January 2020), edited by Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, honors the centennial of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) with a collection of essays

I am the scrape of the lowrider as it exits the driveway,bothering the neighbors.—from “Ars Poetica” HOW IT BEGAN: In my heart I wanted to love better. We are a colonized people putting ourselves together for hundreds of years. Much of our lives, ide

Erou born in the county of Kingsraised in the lap of Queenssitting on the throne of his mama’sfront stoop.Isn’t this how an Erou begins?—from “Erou I.” HOW IT BEGAN: I’ve always been obsessed with mythology, and for years I knew I was, at some point,

“Poetry can change your life, and it doesn’t happen on the page; it happens in the rooms and places where poetry connects you to people who change how you are in the world,” says Megan Burns, publisher of Trembling Pillow Press (tremblingpillowpress.

these five hundred years in our bonesstriated conquistas draggingthe letters of the harrowed tongueinto the geographyof our marrow, down—from “prayer for the children who will be born with today’s daggers in their tomorrow eyes” HOW IT BEGAN: This bo

After moving to a small Norwegian village on the edge of continental Europe’s largest glacier, Beth Peterson began writing the essays that would become her debut collection, Dispatches From the End of Ice (Trinity University Press, November 2019). “I

In October 2019 author Kelly Link and editor-publisher Gavin J. Grant opened their own bookstore in Easthampton, Massachusetts. Book Moon, formerly White Square Books, carries both new and used books and features titles by local authors and a variety

Fifteen years ago we published our first look at debut poets in an effort to brighten the spotlight on emerging poets. Every year since then we have featured ten to eighteen poets who have recently published their debut books—172 poets in total—and g

Suggested Reading: Consider This: Moments in My Writing Life After Which Everything Was Different (Grand Central Publishing, January 2020) by Chuck Palahniuk Best-selling novelist Chuck Palahniuk takes readers behind the scenes of the writing life in

THE LITERARY AGENT ASSISTANT is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. SAY you’ve written a young adult novel and you think Emily van Beek is the right literary agent to represent your work. You’ve read her bio on the website for her agen

WRITER’S block, I have always maintained, is not real. It is an invention. A self-inflicted wound. A chimera. After all, every time we fall asleep we write stories in our dreams. And yet whenever I give a talk to young writers, eventually a hand goes