Poets & Writers Magazine

1 week ago | pw.org | Maya C. Popa

In March, Monica Youn was appointed the new judge of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, the oldest annual literary award in the United States, offering a $1,000 advance and a publication contract from Yale University Press for a debut poetry collection. She succeeds Rae Armantrout, who had served as judge since 2021. A former constitutional lawyer, Youn is a professor of English at the University of California in Irvine and president of the board of Poets House in New York City.

1 week ago | pw.org | Kevin Nguyen |Kevin Nguyễn

I started my first novel because my day job was boring. It was the 2010s, the waning years of the Silicon Valley boom, and I was in a low-level position at a gigantic tech company where I was mostly tasked with regurgitating PowerPoints. When I wasn’t losing at ping-pong in the dedicated ping-pong room, I usually squirreled away in nap pods trying to write.

3 weeks ago | pw.org | Elizabeth Gray

In our Craft Capsule series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 234. A nineteenth-century British legal opinion about an insurance claim. A caption-less photograph of a Holocaust killing ground that goes unmentioned in the surrounding text. The loss of young love, childhood, and a grandmother entangled with text from a decades-old tourist guide to Florida that describes flora and fauna now vanished beneath urban development.

1 month ago | pw.org | Serena Alagappan

The person behind the viral Instagram account @poetryisnotaluxury, which has garnered more than 845,000 followers, says they started the page in 2016 “almost by accident.” When their father got sick that winter, the curator, who prefers to remain anonymous, began collecting poems in screenshots, taking pictures of pages in books that particularly moved them, and posting the poems on Instagram.

2 months ago | pw.org | Kate Tuttle

In Kevin Wilson’s fifth novel, Run for the Hills, forthcoming in May from Ecco, a quartet of half-siblings, strangers to one another, join up to embark on a cross-country road trip to California to confront their father, who over the years had left each of them in turn to form a new family. Charles Hill, the absent father, is a man with “no anchor,” Wilson says.