Monday Memo

This week we're talking about:

• Poetry, poetry, poetry. It's National Poetry Month, and we're starting April with poems from APS No. 27, including "After Pasternak, 1917" by Reginald Gibbons, whose translations of the Russian poet will be published later this year: "At night, outside / the closed windows within me, / I see tiny fierce stars glitter."
• Camille Rankine's upcoming Words in Action workshop at A Public Space. We'll generate new work as we chart a course through the landscape of arts and action; and read the work of Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Layli Long Soldier, Adrienne Rich, and others, investigating along the way ideas of literary activism—and what responsibilities a writer may (or may not) have to their communities. We're excited to be partnering with Well-Read Black Girl to present this workshop, which begins April 11. Register here.
• The New York Public Library's acquisition of the poet Wanda Coleman's archive, which includes scrapbooks of news clippings, research material, and early drafts; correspondence; and notebooks, donated by Amber Tamblyn. "Demotic, idiosyncratic, at once celebratory and embittered, Coleman’s poems are not always easy or reassuring reading," Marilyn Hacker wrote when Coleman received the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. "But the generosity of their larger-than-life extravagance, their careful tempering of self-mockery, their elastic balance of overstatement and control, make them a continual, renewable reward."
• And thinking of libraries, we are celebrating Sue Halpern's essay "In Praise of Public Libraries" in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books: "A public library is predicated on an ethos of sharing and egalitarianism. It is nonjudgmental. It stands in stark opposition to the materialism and individualism that otherwise define our culture. It is defiantly, proudly, communal." There is still time to take advantage of our subscription partnership, and to receive subscription to both A Public Space and the New York Review of Books at a very special rate. Join us today.
• We're back today from the annual AWP conference, this year held in Portland, Oregon, where cherry blossoms were in bloom, the sun came out for three glorious days, and APS editors got to do their favorite thing: talk about books and magazines with curious readers and writers from all over the world. Highlights included: meeting subscribers; celebrating The Story Prize Anthology; the sprawling bookfair with over 700 exhibitors; Colson Whitehead's keynote, and his advice to read the great works you find, not the great works found for you; and an impromptu chapbook signing at the A Public Space table by Arisa White, one of the winners of the Per Diem Press Chapbook contest.