Roxane Gay is starting an imprint with Grove Atlantic. Roxane Gay Books will publish three books per year, focusing on underrepresented voices. Gay told the Times that she will be accepting submissions this summer from writers with or without agents: “There are so many barriers and so many gates. Let’s take them down.” Grove is also starting a paid one-year fellowship program, a “crash course” in publishing open to applicants outside traditional publishing circles.
Faculty leaders from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are urging their board of trustees to vote on Nikole Hannah-Jones’s tenure case immediately. Last week, the board “took the highly unusual step” of overriding the Hussman School of Journalism’s recommendation that Hannah-Jones be awarded tenure alongside her recent appointment as Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism. Inside Higher Ed reports that “it is widely suspected that she’s been targeted for her reporting on race,” and William Eggington, writing for the New Republic, takes Hannah-Jones’s case as an indication that the institution of academic tenure is itself in disrepair.
The New Yorker Union has said it is on the verge of a strike after more than two years of contract negotiations with management.
Duke University press editorial director Gisela Fosado has released a statement on Andrea Smith, the subject of a recent New York Times Magazine story, “The Native Scholar Who Wasn’t,” and an author that the press has published in the past. Fosado has apologized for publishing Smith’s last book, writing, “Our publication of her work continued to provide her with a platform, and became a legitimation in itself, allowing others to ignore the damage she caused. We are sorry.” Duke UP will not publish any more works by Smith and has promised to give the proceeds of Smith’s two recent books to the press’s Scholars of Color First Book Fund. For more on Smith, see this 2018 open letter from indigenous women scholars.
Tonight is the 2021 n+1 Writers Awards Ceremony. The event, which will present the n+1 Writers’ Fellowship and the Anthony Veasna So Fiction Prize, is at 7:30 via Zoom. Elif Batuman will host as the awards are presented to Christina Nichol and Trevor Shikaze.
Join Bookforum contributors Lauren Oyler, Ed Park, Omari Weekes, and Jo Livingstone on Tuesday, June 1 at 7pm EST to celebrate the release of our Summer issue with a panel discussion on authenticity, risk, and the future of fiction. What forms of art, activism, and literature can speak authentically now? What risks are still available to writers? Truth or dare (or both)? We’ll explore these questions and more. This event is free and will be hosted on Zoom.
