The Audacious Round Up
The April selection for The Audacious Book Club is Ancestor Trouble by Maud Newton. We will be in conversation with Maud on April 27th at 8 pm EST/5 pm PST. Registration is open.
Tressie, Debbie Millman and I are hosting a writing workshop retreat in July 2022. You can also register for this if you want to spend a weekend with us. We hope to see you there! It will be fun and more.
Roxane Gay Books is closed to unagented submissions until 6/15/2022. I’ve found, I think, my first few books! I am open to agented submissions so please send me great books! I am also open, again, for submissions to The Audacity’s Emerging Writer Series. Read the guidelines and submit your best writing. Submissions will be open until I have 24 essays.
Don’t Forget: Why Design Matters by Debbie Millman.
This week in the Emerging Writer Series, Birthday Dessert by Rebecca Arrowsmith.
New week, new work friend, where I suggest, correctly, that no meeting should ever happen at 8 am or earlier, don’t @ me.
On The Roxane Gay Agenda this week, I speak with director Janicza Bravo.
A wonderful poem by Rio Cortez. Rio has a collection coming out later this year and I can’t wait for it.
Interesting new publication, The Bureau Dispatch, looks at writers’ desks.
The art gallery 52 Walker has created a lending library.
A profile of dancer Story P.
For Lit Hub, Terese Mailhot writes about what book royalties can and cannot buy.
A conversation with Judd Apatow, still an optimist.
Shocking news—the student loan freeze is helping people. Cancel student loan debt.
A man tried for spousal abuse actually faced consequences.
The longest hedge maze in the world.
The royals went on a weird colonial tour that seemed wildly oblivious to, well, everything. Jamaicans wanted none of it but they do want reparations.
Bitcoin miners, smh, are heading to Kentucky to further destroy the planet.
Speaking of a dying planet, an ice shelf in Antarctica fell and that seems not good.
New fiction from Kristen Arnett.
Some high schoolers did a racism but didn’t know it was a racism. Or something.
Soraya Nadia McDonald asks if Will Smith should win the Oscar for King Richard. It is a nuanced piece and she asks an important question.
A young boy died after falling out of an amusement park ride. Tragic all around.
After months of harassment and other violence, (years really), Asian American women are fighting back.
And Elaine Hsieh Chou writes about the things white men say about Asian women, and so much more.
Six rules for film editing that also apply to prose editing.
Two more black trans women have been murdered. There are multiple epidemics happening right now.
Chris Wallace goes long on why he left Fox but, I mean, it’s interesting that he thinks things became untenable there so recently given, well, everything about Fox.
RIP to the guy who invented gifs. And RIP to Madeleine Albright.
Ash Barty, the #1 tennis player in the world, has retired at 25.
A little something on Starstruck’s season 2 which I cannot wait to watch. Season 1 was just so charming.
Maud Newton’s Ancestor Trouble, reviewed in The New Republic.
A new poem from Ocean Vuong.
Some Disney employees walked out after their company did the exact wrong thing when standing up for trans kids or anything at all.
A deep dive into the writing of Helen DeWitt.
I LOVE the line, princes, princesses, queens live in fairy tale. Now, I have no issue with folks being as royal as their countries allow them to be, but how you use your royalty is my question. All these colonizer nations need to acknowledge that many wrongs were perpetrated on a whole continent and its inhabitants for centuries. The fact that they can’t say what their ancestors had done was wrong is problematic for me.
Reparation is not a gift or welfare. It’s overdue wages for unpaid labor, compensatory damages for physical and mental anguish, punitive damages for the wounds that never heal, guilty verdicts for crimes against humanity.
So, can you at least say I am sorry! Oh! Well, we still want the money because, that’s what started this whole carnage anyway, the greed and the only way you’d feel punishment is in your pocket.
The murders of these trans-women anger me, and the lack of outrage is disturbing. What makes one life more important than another? We can’t stop asking that question, because if we do, then we’d be acknowledging that there is a difference. We all have the right to be who we are.
As an advocate for women and children, it is indeed satisfying to see a man pay CONSEQUENCES for abusing a woman. Too many of these cases go unreported or bullies walk away with a slap on the wrist. About damn time!!!
i dont know why but the last tweet on the shift key has me guffawing.