The poet Tony Hoagland died Tuesday from cancer at the age of sixty-four. Hoagland was the author of many poetry collections, including 2003’s What Narcissism Means to Me, a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. He received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and won the Poetry Foundation’s Mark Twain Award, among other honors. Critic Dwight Garner said of the poet, “At his frequent best . . . Hoagland is demonically in touch with the American demotic.” The Poetry Foundation has twelve of Hoagland’s poems online, including “Bible Study,” which ends with the line: “And God said, Survive. And carry my perfume among the perishing.”
The Washington Post is beefing up their technology coverage, adding twelve new editors, reporters, and videographers
Rebecca Solnit, Ling Ma, Derrick Barnes, and Gordon C. James won this year’s Kirkus Prizes.
At the New Yorker, Hermione Hoby profiles Shelley Jackson, the experimental writer whose new novel, Riddance Or: The Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers & Hearing-Mouth Children, was published last week. Hoby calls Jackson an “advocate for the monstrous,” noting the collection of oddities in her apartment, including a taxidermied two-headed chick, a ventriloquist’s dummy, and an “ear trumpet” from the 1800s. Jackson explained: “I like things that give me the creeps. That’s really where I start writing anything—when I have a reaction that is uneasy, squeamish in some way.”
Tonight at the New York Univeristy bookstore, author and professor Susan Shapiro will host a panel on publishing with writers, editors, and agents.