Beyoncé collaborated with Forrest Gander, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2012, to write a poem called “Bey the Light.” You can read that over here. (Bonus: This isn’t the first time Queen B has teamed up with a prominent writer.)
Bard-yoncé
Add Poems to Your Curriculum
Are you familiar with “Teach This Poem“? If not you should be. This organization just won the National Book Foundation’s 2018 Innovations in Reading Prize. Their literary social impact mission? Help teachers add poetry to their curriculum; “Each week, The Academy of American Poets emails out a poem along with interdisciplinary information — classroom discussion questions and multimedia offerings like maps, videos, photography, and related reading suggestions. Everything is curated to help teachers incorporate poetry into the classroom experience.” Find out more about the prize and the org here.
Tuesday New Release Day: Rosenblatt; Brussolo; Wood; Castillo; Greenwell
Out this week: Thomas Murphy by Roger Rosenblatt; The Deep Sea Diver’s Syndrome by Serge Brussolo; Weathering by Lucy Wood; Remains by Jesús Castillo; and What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell (which we reviewed). For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2016 Book Preview.
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Flavorwire on Author Photos
From Flavorwire, another contribution to the burgeoning field of author photo analysis.
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That Old Imperial Impulse
“The notion that American literature might have an imperial bent—that it might be anything other than a string of lightly co-influential works of ‘imaginative power,’ and might itself reflect our national desire to dominate—is lost on its critics, both right and left.” Jonathan Sturgeon in The Baffler on American exceptionalism and “the imperial self” in fiction, with particular attention paid to the work of two other Jonathans, Franzen and Safran Foer.
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The CIA Supports the Practice of Good Grammar
“’There is absolutely no truth to this allegation [that the CIA is trying to remove ‘ë’ from the Russian alphabet],’ the spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal. ‘The Agency supports the practice of good grammar and pronunciation in any language.’”
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