Yuka Igarashi, the editor in chief of Soft Skull Press and founder of Catapult magazine, will join Graywolf as an executive editor in April. “We needed a fresh vision to shake us up a bit, and to help guide our talented rising editors,” said Graywolf publisher Fiona McCrae in a statement on the hire.
At Hyperallergic, Cyndii Wilde Harris selects a few highlights—including interviews with Mamie Till Mobley and Angela Davis—from the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, which collects and preserves materials with the Library of Congress and GBH Boston.
In the premier episode of a new video series from Artforum and Bookforum, “Artists On Writers | Writers On Artists,” author Hanif Abdurraqib talks to producer/composer Devonté Hynes about their love of sports, their reverence for sampling, and how they find a balance between pessimism and hope.
The Gimlet Media Union is bargaining with the management of Gimlet and Spotify (which acquired the podcast network in 2019). The union is looking for a deal with universal raises, salary minimums, and rights to derivative works by March 11.
For Vulture, Jillian Steinhauer profiles artist Lorraine O’Grady, whose first and long overdue retrospective opens this week at the Brooklyn Museum. In her own words, O’Grady has used her work to “find a way to say who I am.” She has tried many approaches, Steinhauer notes: by the late 1970s, the artist had “started (then abandoned) a novel, started (but not finished) studies at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, married (and then separated from) a filmmaker she met at Iowa, took over a successful translation business in Chicago, and moved to New York, where she kept writing, this time rock criticism for The Village Voice and Rolling Stone. Then she got a job as an adjunct instructor at the School of Visual Arts.” She decided she could become an artist when she realized she would “always be learning.”
Brit Bennett, author of The Vanishing Half, revisits Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, Passing for the New York Times Style Magazine. Writing about the novel’s two protagonists, Bennett writes that Clare Kendry “is a tragic character who believes that she is in a romp. And why would she not? Irene feels burdened by the yoke of race, but Clare recognizes that race itself is a joke. Why should she not have fun with it? And aren’t both women sort of right?” Next Tuesday, Bennett will discuss Passing with Thessaly La Force as part of the T Book Club.
Following review by a panel of educators, Dr. Seuss Enterprises will no longer publish six children’s books because they contain harmful caricatures of Black and Asian people.