Goto, Coyote among Lambda finalists

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This article was published 27/03/2022 (1447 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A poet’s exploration of his childhood experience in the company town created during the building of the Jenpeg dam on the Nelson River is one of the nominees in this year’s Lambda Literary Awards.

Kazim Ali’s Northern Light: Power, Land and the Memory of Water, in which the poet revisits his childhood home to learn of the dam’s effect on the community of Cross Lake, is nominated in the LGBTQ non-fiction category.

It’s one of a number of books with Canadian connections nominated in the 24 categories of the annual awards. Ivan Coyote’s Care Of: Letters, Connections, and Cures, a book of replies to letters the poet/performer has received, is nominated in the transgender nonfiction category. Alex Ohlin, chair of the University of British Columbia creative writing program, is nominated in the bisexual fiction category for her short story collection, We Want What We Want. Grace Zau is nominated in lesbian poetry for The Language We Were Never Taught to Speak. Poet and novelist Hiromi Goto is nominated in the LGBTQ comics category for Shadow Life, for which she has also won an Asian Pacific American Literature Award. P.J. Vernon’s novel Bath Haus is nominated in the LGBTQ mystery category.

The winners will be announced in New York June 11. The full list of nominees is at wfp.to/lambdas.

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To the list of topics that might get a teacher in the Deep South fired — topics such as sex, racism and evolution — you can now add “butts.”

An assistant principal in Mississippi told CBC’s As It Happens recently that he was fired from his job for reading from a kids book entitled I Need a New Butt.

Toby Price told the CBC the incident started when a group of second-graders logged onto Zoom for a reading event and the guest reader didn’t show up. Filling in on short notice, he grabbed the book — about a boy who notices the crack in his butt for the first time and worries that it’s broken — and read from it. (The book is part of a series that includes I Broke My Butt and My Butt is So Noisy.)

He was subsequently fired for his “inappropriate” book choice; the case has since been the subject of a petition by the freedom of expression organization PEN.

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Amazon has abandoned an experiment in bricks-and-mortar bookselling that began in 2015 in Seattle and eventually led to the opening of 25 physical bookstores across the U.S.

According to RetailWire, the company only generated three per cent of its revenue from physical stores, mostly from its ownership of the high-end grocery retailer Whole Foods. While it’s shutting bookstores and many smaller retail locations, Amazon is planning to debut clothing stores under the name Amazon Fashion.

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An independent publisher in Calgary is printing a new edition of a Ukrainian-language anthology from 80 or more years ago as a fundraiser for the Canada-Ukraine Foundation.

Durvile Publications plans to release The Little Book: Story Reader for a Free Ukraine on March 31, according to a CBC story.

The book, which includes letters from the Ukrainian alphabet, illustrations, stories and poems, was originally created for the Ukrainian-Canadian diaspora. The edition will include English translations by McMaster University linguistics and language professor Magda Stroniska, as well as a guide to pronunciation.

Details are at wfp.to/littlebook.

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A wave of resignations by junior and mid-level editorial employees at major publishers has shone a light on low pay, growing workload and limited advancement opportunities in the industry — even as the big publishing conglomerates are reporting high earnings and profits.

A number of editorial assistants and junior editors have gone public about the challenges and sparked discussion of the subject. A recent story on the website PublishersLunch suggests that part of the problem is that senior editors are “technologically illiterate” and dump all of their computer challenges on junior editors and editorial assistants. The story can be found at wfp.to/QXx.

 

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