Robert Wideman, the subject of John Edgar Wideman’s 1984 memoir Brothers and Keepers, has been serving a sentence of life without parole, but now that Governor Tom Wolf has commuted his sentence, he will soon be free. Robert was convicted of second-degree murder for being an accomplice in a 1975 robbery that resulted in the shooting and death of a car salesman named Nichola Morena. Brothers and Keepers explored the different paths that the author and his sibling had taken: “However numerous and comforting the similarities, we were different," the author wrote. "The world had seized on the difference, allowed me room to thrive, while he'd been forced into a cage. Why did it work that way? What was the nature of the difference? Why did it haunt me?"
Ira Silverberg lists his favorite books of prose by poets.
Publishers have been closely following Donald Trump’s decision to delay his proposed 25 percent tariff on goods imported from China. Many publishers have “no choice but to use Chinese printers,” so the tariffs, if they become a reality, would have a deep impact on the industry.
Washington State poet laureate Claudia Castro Luna, who is working on a memoir about her escape from the Salvadorian Civil War, describes the traumas experienced by immigrant children who are separated from their parents. “These days I cannot read stories of the children at the border in one sitting. My throat pinches closed, and I can’t breathe as my body floods with fear. To the body, trauma is trauma. I don’t have to see pictures of the children in detention centers or finish articles to imagine what they are feeling or to feel again my own despair.”
