Chicago - A message from the station manager

Local Book Notes: I Am Not The Unabomber

And Neither Are They

1. Book One.
“The first American book – and one of the most valuable – is coming to town,” the Tribune reports.
“In advance of it being sold at auction, the work known as the “Bay Psalm Book,” printed in 1640, will be on display at the Newberry Library, 60 W. Walton St., from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday.”


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2. Young Chicago Authors Rocks It.


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3. The Cost of Censorship in Libraries: 10 Years Under the Children’s Internet Protection Act.
“This year marks the 10-year anniversary of the enforcement of the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), which brought new levels of Internet censorship to libraries across the country. CIPA was signed into law in 2000 and found constitutional by the Supreme Court in 2003. The law is supposed to encourage public libraries and schools to filter child pornography and obscene or ‘harmful to minors’ images from the library’s Internet connection in exchange for continued federal funding.
“Unfortunately, as Deborah Caldwell-Stone explains in ‘Filtering and the First Amendment,’ aggressive interpretations of this law have resulted in extensive and unnecessary censorship in libraries, often because libraries go beyond the legal requirements of CIPA when implementing content filters.
“As a result, students and library patrons across the country are routinely and unnecessarily blocked from accessing constitutionally protected websites.”
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4. The FBI Kept Its Own Notes On ‘Dirty Old Man’ Charles Bukowski.
“The writer was investigated by the agency as a civil servant with ties to the underground press – and for being a self-described ‘dirty old man.’
“Recently National Book Award-winning author William T. Vollmann went public with his FBI surveillance, writing about his experiences of both being watched and reading the report. (At one point, as Vollmann writes in this month’s Harper’s, he was suspected of being the Unabomber.) Now the FBI has released files showing it kept tabs on hundreds of writers, including Bukowski.”
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5. FBI Continues To Investigate Michael Hastings’ ‘Controversial Reporting.’
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6. Drinking While Pregnant.
“University of Chicago economist Emily Oster approached her pregnancy much like she does her job, challenging assumptions and evaluating data on what she could safely eat and drink during the nine-month gestational period.
Now she’s put her findings in a new book – and provoked outrage among doctors and patients who vehemently disagree with her conclusion that it is harmless to drink a limited amount of alcohol during pregnancy.”
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7. Poetry Fellows.
“The Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine are pleased to announce the five recipients of 2013 Ruth Lilly Fellowships: Harmony Holiday, Matthew Nienow, Hannah Sanghee Park, Natalie Shapero and Phillip B. Williams. Among the largest awards offered to aspiring poets in the United States, the $15,000 scholarship prize is intended to encourage the further study and writing of poetry and is open to all U.S. poets between 21 and 31 years of age.
“Harmony Holiday was born in Waterloo, Iowa, and educated at the University of California at Berkeley and Columbia University. Her debut collection of poems, Negro League Baseball (Fence, 2011), won the Fence Books Motherwell Prize. Go Find your Father/A Famous Blues, a ‘dos-a-dos’ book featuring poetry, letters and essays, is due out from Ricochet Editions in fall 2013. Holiday lives in New York City.
“Matthew Nienow was born in Los Angeles in 1983 and spent most of his youth in Seattle. He holds an MFA from the University of Washington and a degree in Traditional Small Craft from the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding. His work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, New England Review, Poetry and two editions of the Best New Poets anthology (2007 and 2012). He lives with his wife and two sons in Port Townsend, Washington where he builds boats and custom wooden paddle boards.
“Hannah Sanghee Park was born in Tacoma, Washington, in 1986. She earned a BA from the University of Washington and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her chapbook, Ode Days Ode, was published by the Catenary Press in 2011. Her work is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2013 and Poetry Northwest. Park lives in Los Angeles and is currently studying at the USC School of Cinematic Arts.
“Natalie Shapero was born in Chester, Pennsylvania, in 1982. She received a BA from the Johns Hopkins University, an MFA from the Ohio State University and a JD from the University of Chicago Law School. She is the author of the poetry collection No Object (Saturnalia, 2013) and her writing has appeared in The Believer, The New Republic, Poetry, The Progressive and elsewhere. Shapero is a 2012-2014 Kenyon Review fellow at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio.
“Phillip B. Williams was born 1986 in Chicago. He is the author of the chapbooks Bruised Gospels (Arts in Bloom Inc., 2011) and Burn (YesYes Books, 2013). Williams is a Cave Canem graduate and the poetry editor of the online journal Vinyl Poetry. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Blackbird, Callaloo, Kenyon Review Online, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Southern Review, West Branch and others. Williams is currently a Chancellor’s Graduate fellow at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri and is working on his MFA in creative writing.
These five emerging voices will be featured in Poetry magazine’s November issue.
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8. Prose Awards.
“The Guild Literary Complex is proud to announce an open submission period for our Annual Prose Awards. Every fall, the Guild Complex acknowledges emerging and established writers via a judged competition and recognition event at the historic Chopin Theatre in Chicago. A cash prize of $250 in each category (fiction and non-fiction) will be awarded. This year’s guest judges are Cristina Henríquez (fiction) and Miles Harvey (non-fiction). The deadline to submit is Tuesday, October 1, 2013.
“Writers of all backgrounds and experience levels are invited to submit, and all themes and subjects are welcome. Illinois residents 18 years and older should submit a single piece of short fiction or non-fiction of no more than a 1,000 words typed, to contest@guildcomplex.org. There is a $5 submission fee payable via our website and paypal. Submission fee also includes admission to the live event. All applications must be completed by 5 p.m. on October 1. Incomplete applications will not be accepted. For a full list of contest rules or for information regarding mailed submissions please go to our website.
ABOUT THE JUDGES
Cristina Henríquez is the author of The Book of Unknown Americans, forthcoming from Knopf in June 2014, as well as the novel The World in Half, and the short story collection Come Together, Fall Apart, which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, American Scholar, Glimmer Train, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, AGNI, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. She lives in Illinois with her husband and two children
Miles Harvey wrote How Long Will I Cry?: Voices of Youth Violence, a play that premiered at Steppenwolf Theatre in 2013. His previous work includes The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime (Random House), a national and international bestseller that USA Today named one of the 10 best books of 2000, and Painter in a Savage Land: The Strange Saga of the First European Artist in North America (Random House), which received a 2008 Editors’ Choice honor from Booklist, and a best-books citation from the Chicago Tribune. He currently teaches creative writing at DePaul University.
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Comments welcome.

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Posted on September 10, 2013