Verses for Hope, the National Book Award winners, and more
News, Reviews, and Interviews
The National Book Award winners have been announced! Colson Whitehead, Ibram X. Kendi, and Daniel Borzutzky have won for fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, respectively.
Last Sunday the Academy of American Poets presented a pop-up reading, “Verses for Hope,” in New York’s Washington Square Park. Via Poets.org, you can watch video of Elizabeth Alexander reading her poem “Praise Song for the Day” and read Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise.”
Three Percent’s newly released count of translated fiction and poetry shows an uptick in translated books from AmazonCrossing since 2013.
“I tell him how our people have survived.” Recent NSK Prize finalist Jacqueline Woodson shares how she comforted her frightened son after the election results.
Bob Dylan will not attend the Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm this December.
Literary Hub has rounded up these 10 contemporary novels by and about Muslims that you should read.
Brain Pickings reflects on Chinua Achebe’s message on the “essential plurality of perspectives” and how “storytelling helps us survive history’s rough patches.”
In this essay from the New Yorker, Junot Díaz captures how to cope with Trump’s win with “radical hope.”
Oxford Dictionaries has declared “post-truth” the international word of the year.
Fun Finds and Inspiration
This reading list for resistance includes 25 works of poetry and fiction for anger and action.
Kindness over fear. This Brain Pickings article shares Naomi Shihab Nye’s remarkable real-life story that inspired her poem “Kindness.”
Bustle recommends these 16 feminist memoirs to heal and inspire readers.
