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With National Novel Writing Month already halfway over, many writers may be struggling to find new ways to motivate themselves to finish their marathon projects. Whereas old school methods such as the satisfying, yet solitary, thrill of accomplishment may have been enough back in the day, now, technology-hungry, modern-day writers have many more reward options…
The United States is getting a new addition. In early 2017, the first museum dedicated to writers from the USA, the American Writers Museum, will open. Its mission will be to celebrate American writers and literature. The idea came from Malcolm O’Hagan, an Irish immigrant and retired engineer who is raising the funds for the project. He recently announced that the…
At the tail end of Banned Books Week, when some in the States were questioning whether raising awareness of freedom of speech was necessary anymore, on the other side of the world, in India, many authors were banding together in protest of what they see as the nation’s rising intolerance towards free of speech. Around forty prominent Indian…
Just in time for Banned Books Week, the first book to be banned in New Zealand in twenty years is available in the United States. The young adult novel, Into the River by Ted Dawe, which ironically won the 2013 New Zealand Post Children’s Book Award, was banned last month from being distributed in bookstores…
Social media is in the spotlight—or crosshairs, as it may be–in the literary landscape this week. Several articles and author interviews have touched upon both the benefits and the tremendous costs known to an author maintaining their online presence, none of them coming to a firm conclusion about whether it’s better to be Harper Lee or Hanya Yanagihara, Cheryl…
Garbage collector Jose Gutierrez gives new meaning to the phrase “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” The 53-year-old Colombian man has been collecting children’s books out of dumps for the past twenty years in order to provide a makeshift library to the city of Bogota. He now houses over twenty-thousand titles rescued from…
As students and teachers alike head back to school this month, the Academy of American Poets is offering an email service designed to better integrate poetry into the classroom. Based on the popular Poem-A-Day series, where a previously unpublished poem is shared via email to subscribers, Teach This Poem launches September 2 and will include interactive…
Writer Catherine Nichols’ recent experiment, in which she submitted a manuscript to agents under a male pseudonym and received eight-and-a-half times the number of responses that the same manuscript received under her real name, confirms a gender bias in publishing that desperately needs addressing. Nichols is not without precedent in her experiment. Many famous examples of…
The recent appointment of Dr. Suzanne Koven to the first-ever writer-in-residence program at Massachusetts General Hospital has me asking: is the U.S. as a nation starting to re-value creativity after years of putting math and science first? An assistant professor of medicine at Harvard and renowned writer, Koven, in addition to her MD, holds an MFA in…
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