The Writer's News Reprinted from the May/Summer 2010 issue of the Writer's Chronicle. News | Obituaries | Awards News Common Core Academic Standards Proposed Governors and state school officials have proposed a blueprint aimed to raise academic standards across the nation, the Washington Post reports. The state-led changes are designed to have consistent expectations for students in grades K-12, primarily for their work in the English language arts and mathematics. In language arts, for example, fourth-graders would be required to illustrate the differences between prose and poetry, and would be expected to use words like rhythm, verse, and meter when discussing a poem. The plan lists several classic works that students should read (such as Tuck Everlasting and The Grapes of Wrath, intended for fourth-graders and tenth-graders respectively), and the plan also urges more nonfiction texts. William Schmidt, a professor of education and statistics at Michigan State University, examined the proposal and believes the core standards will assist the nation as a whole. “In this country, the state you live in matters as to what kinds of mathematics you will be expected to learn at various grade levels,” he said. “That’s a profound issue of equality and equity.” Government officials also support the proposal. “We believe this in the best interest of education not only in Georgia but nationally,” Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue (R) said, “to have some standards that present an authentic, credible scoreboard by which we know how we’re doing.” The president has enthusiastically supported the states’ action as an avenue to keep the nation competitive and increase academic opportunity.
AWP's Donald Hall Prize Winner Wins Some More!
Apple's iPad to Feature iBooks Store Apple’s newest product, the iPad, is about to hit the market, and according to research conducted by Busted Loop, a San Francisco-based mobile media company, Apple has created many categories within the iBooks store, Forbes reports. iPad readers will choose from over twenty book categories, including “Fiction & Literature,” “Comics & Graphic Novels,” and “Reference.” Falling under those major categories will be more than 150 sub-categories, such as “Special Ingredients” under “Cookbooks” and “Manga” under “Comics & Graphic Novels.” The iPad will debut April 3, 2010.
Tales For a Ninth Grade Someone Yorkshire Post names ten “must-reads” for teenagers, and their list isn’t tainted by cult favorites like Harry Potter or The Da Vinci Code. No, this list is comprised “in the hope of preventing any further crimes against literature.” The list of books, ordered alphabetically by author, is: The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks; A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess; Lord of the Flies by William Golding; The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Hadden; To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee; Animal Farm by George Orwell; The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger; Dracula by Bram Stoker; The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien; and The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged Thirteen and Three Quarters by Sue Townsend.
Medical Professionals Form Book Club Doctors, nurses, and other health care workers in Columbia, Missouri have formed a book club, the Morning Sentinel reports. Their discussions are centered on medical-themed literature. Those in the medical profession are especially drawn to literature because it is another way to understand people, and sometimes that understanding isn’t always as black and white as it is in the medical world. Conversations at these book club meetings remind us that the humanities are important to everyone, not just literature students.
The Times, They Are A-Changin' A study published by The American Scholar last fall shows a swap in what undergraduates are inclined to study in American higher education. Despite economic trends, students prefer to study business, making it “the most popular major in the nation’s colleges and universities.” And which major’s popularity is rapidly decreasing? English. In fact, while students formerly preferred the humanities, their popularity as a whole has declined in recent years.
Vote for the Best "Lost" Book for the Man Booker Prize In 1971, the Man Booker Prize changed its award procedure, from awarding books retrospectively to awarding books published in the same year, the Times reports. Additionally, in the same year, the date the award was given moved from April to November, creating one year’s gap between books eligible for the prize. This March, a panel of three judges will compose a shortlist of six books all published in 1970, and then the international reading public will determine the winner by voting via the Man Booker Prize website. The winner will be determined in May.
Another Reason to Visit Beautiful Key West! The American Library Association names Ernest Hemingway’s Key West home a literary landmark, Yahoo News reports. Hemingway made a home there with his second wife and their two sons in the 1930s, and owned the Spanish-colonial until he died in 1961. In the nine years that he lived there, he wrote the majority of his lifetime works, including the Key West-based novel To Have and Have Not. According to the American Library Association’s website, other notable Key West literary landmarks include the former homes of Elizabeth Bishop, Stephen Crane, Robert Frost, John Hersey, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Wallace Stevens, and Tennessee Williams.
Interactive Graphic Novels to Launch in June Classical Comics, a UK publisher, plans to release the much-anticipated interactive version of Shakespeare’s Macbeth this June. Two years ago, Classical Comics launched a series of graphic novels of famous titles, but the publisher decided that the next step in its quest to make classic stories accessible to schoolchildren and teens “would be to bring the text alive.” Readers can choose to watch one panel at a time or watch it in “movie mode,” and they can choose from three versions to read: the original Shakespearean text, a contemporary rendering, or a reduced version for younger readers. The novel will be previewed in schools before launching this spring, and managing director Clive Bryant envisions the text will be taught before a whole class. The artwork and animation is rendered from Jon Haward’s original graphic novel, and Derek Jacobi and Juliet Stevenson do voiceovers. If the project is successful with schools, Classic Comics plans to create other interactive graphic novels, Bryant says, including Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Spring Fever 2010 New Delhi News announced the weeklong open-air literary festival, Spring Fever 2010, which was held in the amphitheatre of the India Habitat Centre in New Delhi. The festival featured readings from authors Yann Martel, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Sarita Mandanna, and Omair Ahmad, among many others. Poetry readings were held in the evenings. An open-air library showcased modern classics by Penguin-Books India and were sold at discounted prices. There was also a children’s section separate to the rest. The festival ran from March 13–21, 2010.
iPhone Apps: Books Outnumber Games According to the Guardian and data released by the mobile advertising company Mobclix, there are more books available as iPhone apps as compared to the number of games. The iPhone has most often been perceived as a “games-centric device,” but as of now, there are over 27,000 books available as apps and only 25,400 games. With the debut this April of the iPad, the newest electronic reader to hit the market, the difference in numbers should increase further still. Digital publishers agree that this news is very exciting. According to Dan Franklin, Cannongate’s digital editor, with the launch of the iPad and the iBookstore imminent, “this is the key year for electronic books.”
Obituaries
Awards 2009 PEN Faulkner Award for Fiction: Sherman Alexie for War Dances. $15,000. Judges: Rilla Askew, Kyoko Mori, and Al Young. Florida International University’s First Lawrence Sanders Award in Fiction: Scott Turow. $5,000. 2010 Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas Lifetime Achievement Award: Sherman Alexie. Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas 2009 First Book Award for Prose: JudyLee Oliva. Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas 2009 First Book Award for Poetry: L. Rain Cranford-Gomez. Glimmer Train December Fiction Open Winners:
2010 Mississippi Review Prize:
Massachusetts Review’s 6th Annual Anne Halley Poetry Prize. Donald Morrill for “Enemy Infant, published in the Fall 2009 issue of the Massachusetts Review. 50th Annual Western Heritage Wrangler Award: Jeanetta Calhoun Mish for Work is Love Made Visible. Reed Magazine’s 2010 Edwin Markham Prize for Poetry: Scott Marengo for “The Wedding Gift,” “The Open Gate,” and three other poems. $1,000. Reed Magazine’s 2010 John Steinbeck Award for the Short Story: Michelle Dove for “The Frost Queen of Louisa County. $1,000.
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Beth Bachmann’s Temper, winner of the 2008 AWP Award Series Donald Hall Prize (published in Fall 2009 by University of Pittsburgh Press), was selected by judges Linda Gregerson, Carl Phillips, Paul Muldoon, Ted Genoways, and Charles Harper Webb as winner of this year’s $10,000 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. The award is given annually by Claremont Graduate University to “a first book by a poet of genuine promise.” 2008 AWP Award judge Lynn Emanuel calls Temper “an unforgettable first book…Temper’s account of a murder encompasses the polarities of flesh and spirit, love and horror.” Poet Nick Flynn writes of the book, “a beautiful unease suffuses these poems-they make me aware I’m alive, and certain of nothing.” Bachmann’s poems appear in APR, Ploughshares and Tin House. She teaches creative writing at Vanderbilt University.
Howard Zinn, the author of People’s History of the United States, died January 27, of a heart attack in a swimming pool in Santa Monica, CA, where he was on a speaking tour, The Washington Post reports. An activist historian, Dr. Zinn holds degrees from New York University and Columbia University. Through his book, Dr. Zinn provided an alternative to the popular depiction of history. “There is no such thing as impartial history,” Dr. Zinn told biographers Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller. “The chief problem in historical honesty isn’t outright lying. It is omission or de-emphasis of important data.” First published in 1980, the book resonated with readers and quickly became a bestseller. Surviving are his two children and five grandchildren. Dr. Zinn was 87.
Barry Hannah, acclaimed Southern author of many short story collections and novels, died at his home in Oxford, MS., on March 1, the New York Times reports. Born in Meridian, MS., on April 23, 1942, Mr. Hannah was educated at Mississippi College and later awarded the University of Arkansas’s first MFA degree in fiction in 1967. According to Vanity Fair, Mr. Hannah’s first novel, Geronimo Rex, was nominated for the National Book Award, and Gordon Lish at Esquire first published many of his stories. Grove/Atlantic published many of Mr. Hannah’s later books, and Grove/Atlantic publisher Morgan Entrekin says, “His prose was electric and sharp as barbed wire, his vision of the ‘new’ South grim, hilarious, biting, and profound.” Mr. Hannah was 67.
Ai, National Book Award winner and Guggenheim fellow, passed away unexpectedly from an illness on March 20, Oklahoma State University reports. The author of seven poetry collections, Ai was best known for working in the dramatic monologue. Born October 21, 1947 in Albany, Texas, she lived much of her early life in Arizona. She received degrees from the University of Arizona and the University of California, Irvine. She received many awards in her lifetime for her poetry, including National Endowment for the Arts Awards in both 1978 and 1985, and the Lamont Poetry Award from the Academy of American Poets for Killing Floor (1979). She was a professor in the Creative Writing Program at Oklahoma State University from 1999 until her death, and was most recently recognized, in December 2009, with a United States Artists Ford Fellowship in literature. No Surrender, a new volume of poetry, is scheduled to be published this September by W.W. Norton.
Lucille Clifton, two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist for poetry, passed away on February 13 at Johns Hopkins Hospital after a long battle with cancer, The Baltimore Sun reports. She was 73. Born in Depew, NY, as Thelma Lucille Stayles, Clifton attended both Howard University and SUNY-Fredonia. Clifton published several poetry collections with BOA Editions, and she was awarded the National Book Award for Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems (1988-2000). According to the New York Times, in 2007, Clifton was the second woman and the first African-American to win the prestigious Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. In addition to eleven poetry collections, Clifton also published many well-received books of children’s literature. According to a press release from BOA Editions, Li-Young Lee remembers Clifton, his friend, and says, “If the chief aim of civilization is to provide security for human beings, Lucille was one of its finest builders and architects. Her work sorts meaning from noise, sense from nonsense, good readings of our world from bad readings. She was a friend to me, a mentor, and a mirror of my better self. I loved her and learned to love the world because of her.” Clifton also served as Distinguished Professor of Humanities at St. Mary’s College in Maryland, and was the poet laureate of Maryland from 1979 to 1985.
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