paper trail

The New Yorker Union reaches agreement with management over “just cause”; Akwaeke Emezi disavows the Women’s Prize

Akwaeke Emezi. Photo: © Scottie O.

The New Yorker Union has reached an agreement with management to add a “just cause” clause to their collective bargaining agreement, ending the era of at-will employment. Senator Elizabeth Warren, representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and former attorney general Eric Holder had joined a boycott of last night’s festival events before an agreement had been reached. The president of the NewsGuild of New York, Susan DeCarava, told CNN: “I do want to give some credit to management at the New Yorker for finally being able to listen and hear what their employees were saying and how important it was. I think the involvement of Representative Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Warren helped them hear us a little bit better.”

The National Book Award finalists have been announced. Rumaan Alam and Lydia Millet are among the fiction contenders, with Jenn Shapland and Karla Cornejo Villavicencio among the finalists in nonfiction.

Siglio Press has launched a Kickstarter to raise funds for “It Is What It Is”: All the Cards Issued to Donald Trump, January 2017 - January 2021, a four-volume set of artist’s books by Richard Kraft—playing the role of a soccer referee—in which he issues colored cards to Donald Trump for various transgressions. Dissatisfied with the range of colored cards available (just yellow for a warning and red for a dismissal), Kraft added more hues, including purple for the president’s worst deeds.

Akwaeke Emezi, author of the novels The Death of Vivek Oji and Freshwater and the first non-binary transgender writer to be nominated for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, will not have their future work entered for the UK award. The decision is a response to a request from the Women’s Prize for information about the author’s sex “as defined ‘by law.’” In a statement on Twitter, Emezi wrote: “Forget about me—I don’t want this prize—but anyone who uses this kind of language does not fuck with trans women either, so when they say it’s for women, they mean cis women. And yes, this does mean that them longlisting [Freshwater] was transphobic.”

The Nation’s “Fall Books” issue is out now, with reviews by Lovia Gyarkye, Jeet Heer, Charlie Savage, Elias Rodriques and more.