Posts featuring Joanna Walsh

#ReadWomen: A Focus for 2019—And Beyond

December 31, 2018  |  in Essays  |  by Matthew Jakubowski

What was activism and new awareness has become habit and daily practice.

It’s been five years since I wrote for the Asymptote blog about my resolution to read only books by women for a year, and nearly five years since British author Joanna Walsh created the #readwomen2014 hashtag on Twitter. Around the same time, Walsh also started the @read_women Twitter account, which gained more than 25,000 followers. The account, which Walsh maintained with the help of several other people, was retired on June 16, 2018, after four and a half years online.

Walsh’s efforts sparked a worldwide movement among readers, activists, bookstores, and publishers that gained worldwide press coverage. The tag evolved to #readwomen as people continued to share the names of underappreciated writers and discuss ways to balance the literary scales that have been tipped for centuries against women. As novelist Alexander Chee wrote in an October 2014 essay for The New York Times Book Review, “Walsh’s hashtag became a rallying cry for equal treatment for women writers,” and the movement’s aim of calling out gender bias in publishing and the general public’s reading habits was, as he saw it, “for everyone.”

Near the five-year anniversary of the #readwomen movement, I wanted to look for signs of potential progress for literary fiction by women. What’s changed since 2013? Have conditions improved for literature created by women and those who identify as women or non-binary? What follows is a very brief, scattershot survey of notable points around these questions, a sketch of a small corner of the global picture from my limited perspective. READ MORE…

What’s New with the Crew? A Monthly Update

May 10, 2017  |  in Dispatches, News  |  by Theophilus Kwek

From launching journals to winning literary prizes, our team has had a wonderful month!

Incoming Communications Manager Alexander Dickow has recently received tenure from the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences at Virginia Tech. He currently serves as Assistant Professor of French.

Spanish Social Media Manager Arthur Dixon has launched the second issue of Latin American Literature Today, a new journal where he serves as Managing Editor and Translator.

Drama Editor Caridad Svich has been named one of 2017’s O’Neill Finalists at the National Playwrights Conference for her play, Town Hall.

Romania and Moldova Editor-at-Large Chris Tanasescu (MARGENTO) has launched a book titled poetryartexchange, co-authored with 8 other British and Romanian poets and artists, at the Birmingham Literary Festival. The project is a collaboration between University of Bucharest Press and Centrala, and will see more events in London and Birmingham in May through early June.

Contributing Editor Ellen Elias-Bursac will speak alongside poets Athena Farrokhzad and Noemi Jaffe, and fellow translators Jennifer Hayashida and Julia Sanches, on a panel entitled ‘Corrosive Power’ at PEN America’s World Voices Festival.

READ MORE…

Variations on a Theme: Carolina Schutti & Joanna Walsh on Poetic Prose

May 12, 2016  |  in Dispatches, Translations  |  by Jen Calleja

"Poets have long been questioning the usefulness/uselessness of the label 'prose poem.'"

When I was invited to create a miniseries of semi-regular author events as translator in residence at the Austrian Cultural Forum London, I wanted to make sure that the Austrian author would always be in dialogue with a British counterpart about something they have in common in their writing. My motivation is to juggle the foreignness and uniqueness of German-language literature with where it meets and overlaps with literature written in English in order to show that writing comes from a specific linguistic, cultural and literary context, but one that connects and communicates with others. As journalist Judith Vonberg summed it up in her review of the event for Literaturhaus Europa: “it’s a simple but unconventional idea. Instead of highlighting the differences between British literature and literature made on the continent, the starting point is similarity, which opens up far more interesting discussions.”

The first of these events brought Austrian writer and musician Carolina Schutti and author and illustrator Joanna Walsh together to discuss poetic prose and how poetry permeates their writing in terms of language, effect and form with me in the ACF London’s Salon back in February. As a writer of both poetry and short fiction, I’m interested in why sometimes one form does and then other times won’t do at all, and why it sometimes happens that I can read the poetry and prose of others interchangeably as if in the other form. What are the markers and where is the boundary? READ MORE…