paper trail

Samuel R. Delany on writing; Teen Vogue picks Versha Sharma as editor in chief

Samuel R. Delany

In “Why I Write,” at the Yale Review, the pioneering author and critic Samuel R. Delany explains his lifelong engagement with the torturous profession. Of his early years, Delany observes, “I wrote because I began to realize (to borrow William Blake’s words from Proverbs of Hell), ‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time.’ It keeps producing them—and it keeps destroying them.”

Versha Sharma has been announced as the new editor of Teen Vogue. Sharma was previously the managing editor at NowThis. The hire comes after the previous editor, Alexi McCammond, resigned after an outcry over offensive tweets she had posted in 2011.

Triangle House, the literary agency and online magazine, has announced that it is expanding and has hired Kima Jones and Renée Jarvis.

At the photography site Blind, a look at a new book from MoMA about a Brazillian photo club that took pictures in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. The group of amatuer artists, Foto-Cine Clube Bandeirante in São Paulo, took striking modernist images but have been largely forgotten by art history. MoMA curator Sarah Meister told Blind, “When you see something you really love, as a curator you ask, How is this entirely new to me? How is this utterly absent from any chapter of photographic history that I had ever learned in school?”

Tickets are on sale for the annual PEN America World Voices Festival, which will take place May 18th through the 22nd this year. The opening night event, on Tuesday, May 18th, will be “The People’s History: Writing the Wrongs,” featuring Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Imbolo Mbue, and Maria Hinojosa.