Jonathan Vatner

Dec 11, 2024 | pw.org | Jonathan Vatner

The origin story of the Black List is almost mythic: In 2005, film development executive Franklin Leonard sent an anonymous survey to every Hollywood producer he had met with that year, asking them to name their favorite screenplays they’d passed on during the year because the scripts didn’t match their needs.

Apr 10, 2024 | pw.org | Jonathan Vatner

Last July, shortly after announcing that Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s speculative essay collection, A Black Story May Contain Sensitive Content, had won Diagram’s 2023 chapbook contest, editor Ander Monson received a raft of text messages from concerned friends. He discovered that he and Diagram, a literary magazine that publishes chapbooks through New Michigan Press, were being excoriated on X (formerly Twitter) because Bertram had created the chapbook using artificial intelligence (AI).

Dec 13, 2023 | pw.org | Jonathan Vatner

Essayist Jodie Noel Vinson was finally recovering this summer after three years of “long COVID,” the lingering illness that affects some people after contracting COVID-19, when, despite misgivings, she decided to attend the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in August. Although she knew Bread Loaf’s policy of optional masking and vaccination for participants, she decided the opportunities offered by the prestigious conference outweighed the risks.

Oct 11, 2023 | pw.org | Jonathan Vatner

A  major downpour in July inundated great swaths of Vermont with up to nine inches of water, washing out neighborhoods across the state just twelve years after Hurricane Irene wreaked similar destruction. Scientists say climate change is increasing the frequency of extreme weather events like these.

Aug 16, 2023 | pw.org | Jonathan Vatner

Last fall, Lydia Davis’s agent, Denise Shannon, approached Andy Hunter, founder and CEO of the online bookseller Bookshop, with a question: Would any publisher be willing and able to exclude Amazon from its distribution channels? Davis opposes the mega-retailer and has not purchased anything on Amazon in many years. “It seemed completely unreasonable that I was still allowing them to sell my own books,” Davis wrote in a subsequent message to Hunter.