Honorée Fanonne Jeffers announced on Twitter that she is writing a biography of poet Lucille Clifton. The book will be published in 2026 by Knopf.
For The Drift, Sophie Haigney surveys children’s books written by or about political figures: Kamala Harris, Barack Obama, Condoleezza Rice, Callista Gingrich, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, and Laura Bush, among many others, have all offered their thoughts on life and leadership to kids. These ideas are not subtle, as Haigney notes, “It seems many of us can no longer imagine that children can handle, and may in fact prefer, stories defined by ambiguity—stories that have little to do with contemporary politics but rather to do with life as it is lived.”
Omari Weekes reviews Phillip B. Williams’s new collection, Mutiny, for the Poetry Foundation: “Mutiny showcases the formal and material play that is possible when a poet takes his Blackness on his own terms.”
Tonight at 7:30pm Eastern, the Hamilton Centre for Civic Inclusion hosts Harsha Walia for a discussion of her new book, Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism. For more on Walia, read Natasha Lennard’s review in the new Bookforum.
The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize shortlist has been announced. Finalists include Jackie Polzin for Brood, Patricia Lockwood for Nobody Is Talking About This, Priyanka Champaneri for The City of Good Death, and more.
Haymarket Books has put together a reading list of ten books “that reflect the spectrum of urgent writing often targeted for censorship by prisons across the country.” The publisher will donate one book to an incarcerated reader for each book purchased from this list through October 2.