The Nicaraguan poet, priest, and revolutionary soldier Ernesto Cardenal has died.

A production of Help, Claudia Rankine’s play about white privilege, will open at The Shed next week.

Samanth Subramanian, the author of This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War, reports on India’s new “citizenship law,” Trump’s visit with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and the violence that resulted in at least thirty-eight deaths in Delhi last week.

Publisher’s Weekly offers a glimpse of how the coronavirus could disrupt the book business.

Meanwhile, some pockets of publishing are thriving on the

Elisa Gabbert, poet and author of the collections The Word Pretty and The Self Unstable, will replace David Orr as the New York Times Book Review’s poetry columnist. Gabbert’s first column for the paper will appear next week.

At Nieman Lab, Hanaa’ Tameez looks at a new study conducted by the Center for Media Engagement examining how including reporters’ bios with the stories they write might influence reader engagement and trust. Apparently, it does not: “But as it turns out, your readers…don’t much care.” The study advises newsrooms to use bios “in conjunction with trust-building strategies

Mahogany L. Browne talks with Literary Hub about a new collection of Audre Lorde’s essays and speeches, Sister Outsider: “I have found Black authors constantly fueled by Lorde’s work but also diminished when they find their ‘allies’ aren’t as familiar with Lorde as they are of, say Foucault. And so, I see a constant effort of leveling the playing field (culturally, economically and socially) resulting in a fractured mindset of ‘wokeness’ and well-meaning folks.”

At The Cut, Emily Gould writes about working for Gawker in the late-2000s, and revisits the time she was shamed on television by

Ariana Reines has won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for her new collection, A Sand Book. Discussing her work with Sasha Frere-Jones for Bookforum last winter, Reines observed, “People have different kinds of understandings of form and structure and accuracy. This is especially true of an art like poetry, which is so liquid. It can be about anything, it can take any form, and you don’t have to pay anybody for equipment.”

At Poynter, Mel Grau details the nearly two-year fight at the Boston Globe for a better family-leave policy. Six women journalists led the effort, which ultimately granted

A partnership between Report for America and the Native American Journalists Association will support nineteen reporters covering indigenous issues this year. As Neiman Lab points out, less than one half of one percent of journalists are Native. Professor Joseph Pierce outlines an approach for being an effective reporter in Native communities: “You build trust through listening and through recognizing other people’s knowledge. . . Talking with elders about history is history. It’s not like some tall tale. It’s not an opinion. Granting communities agency over their own stories has really broad

The Guardian has published the exclusive first excerpt from Hilary Mantel’s much-awaited The Mirror and the Light, the third and final installment of her series of historical novels featuring Thomas Cromwell. The paper also has an interview with Mantel, who says she finds it amusing that people have claimed that The Mirror and the Light was delayed because she has writer’s block. “I’ve been like a factory!” She also scoffs at the suggestion that the novel’s completion was difficult because she didn’t want to kill off Cromwell. “It’s not something I’ve ever said; it’s what people think I should

On The Maris Review, Maris Kreizman talks to Ada Calhoun about Generation X, making choices, and her new book, Why We Can’t Sleep. “I think the stigma is gone from things in a way that people can make a lot of different choices, like having kids or not having news. Living in the country or in the city. Getting married or getting divorced,” she said. “There is a liberation in that, but it is true that because everything is possible the pressure does increase on each individual woman to make the right choice for them. How do you know?”

New Republic editor Chris Lehmann tells Mediate about the

The Aspen Words Literary Prize shortlist was announced yesterday. The nominees are Christy Lefteri’s The Beekeeper of Aleppo, Brian Allen Carr’s Opioid Indiana, Nicole Dennis-Benn’s Patsy, Bryan Washington’s Lot, and Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive. The winner will be announced at a ceremony in April.

The Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalists were also announced yesterday. Nominees include Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift, Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School, and, in the newly added Science Fiction category, Marlon James’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf. Walter Mosley will receive a lifetime

Golden Gates author Conor Dougherty lists the books that helped him write his study of the Bay Area’s housing crisis. “Anytime you read a book, even a bad one, you see someone do something you hadn’t thought of before, and it informs how you approach your next piece,” he writes. Selections include Matthew Desmond’s Evicted, Nikole Hannah-Jones’s Living Apart, and Walter Mosley’s White Butterfly.

Pittsburgh’s African American Cultural Center is creating a permanent exhibit about playwright August Wilson. Opening later this year, August Wilson: A Writer’s Landscape will be arranged in three

The reclusive writer Charles Portis—author of Norwood and True Grit, among other novels—has died at the age of eighty-six. The New York Times characterizes his work as a mix of “deadpan humor, oddball characters and occasional bursts of melodrama.” For more on Portis, see Ed Park’s 2003 essay from The Believer: “Like Cormac McCarthy, But Funny.”

At The Outline, Leah Finnegan makes the case for why “We Should All Read more Jenny Diski”: “The casual frankness with which Diski writes is striking, and a necessary tonic in a media landscape prone to making everything seem more urgent than it is.”

Conde Nast’s entertainment division is launching television and film studios for five magazines: the New Yorker, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Wired and GQ. Each studio will identify editorial projects for screen adaptations and podcasts. New Yorker Studios will produce “Spiderhead” for Netflix, a series based on the George Saunders short story.

The McClatchy Company, which publishes thirty local newspapers across the country, is filing for bankruptcy. The newspaper chain is more than $700 million in debt. The proposal has hedge fund Chatham Asset Management running McClatchy as a private company.

At

The New Republic is redesigning its print edition, introducing a metered paywall to its website, and has launched a new podcast, The Politics of Everything. Editor Chris Lehmann said that the new look has a “strong editorial message at the heart of it. The New Republic was created to address industrial capitalism and the rise of consumer culture . . . and in many ways we are facing many similar challenges in the age of Donald Trump

A man has been charged with the muder of Irish journalist Lyra McKee, who was shot last year during a riot in Derry. For on McKee’s life and death, see this