Book News Roundup: Cheap Wine & Poetry, The Lulu Fund, and Anonymous targets a bookstore

  • The lineup for the final Cheap Wine & Poetry at the Hugo House's current location has been announced. Sarah Galvin, Tara Hardy, Roberto Ascalon, and Michelle Peñaloza will be your readers at this historic event. This is the most consistently entertaining — and consistently crowded — poetry reading series in town, and on April 7th it will say goodbye to the stage where it was born. What's next for Cheap Wine & Poetry and its sister series Cheap Beer & Prose? Will it end, or will it continue? If it continues, where will it take place? I've got no answers for you just yet, but stay tuned.

  • Speaking of Cheap Wine & Poetry, your CW&P host Jeanine Walker is hosting her variety show, Mixed Bag, at the Royal Room tomorrow night. It features music and comedy and improv and even though it's not strictly a literary event, you should still go.

  • Beverly Cleary turns 100 on April 12th! What are her secrets for living a century? "Well, I didn't do it on purpose!"

  • Did you read this Salon piece about academia and writing? It's got a barn-burner of a first paragraph:

It is widely held and discussed in our literary community that we are not inclusive and remain biased in favor of the white male. The ongoing conversation about lack of access, lack of diversity of voice, and underrepresented writers led us to look critically at the system in place to discern what was working and what was not. What does it mean to be successful in the literary world? Who gets the prizes? Who has access to mentors and networks? Who is attending residencies that foster community, collaboration, and offer more time to write? In answering these questions, we kept getting pulled back to the same place: Academia. If literature has a gatekeeper, that gatekeeper is academia.
  • The writers of that Salon piece have launched something called The Lulu Fund which vows to work "within the literary community to shift established systems that benefit the few, and to promote the understanding within intersectional feminism that racial, gender, and class justice must be sought as a whole." The organization will give out their first awards, The Lulus, on March 31st.

  • Online activism group Anonymous has singled out Denver bookstore The Tattered Cover for their support of a business organization which promotes policies that are anti-homeless.

  • In Bosnian, says [Aleksandar] Hemon, “there are no words for fiction and nonfiction, or the distinction thereof”.