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New England Literary News in a new form

Welcome, welcome. For eight years, I wrote a weekly column for the Boston Globe on New England Literary News. The Globe cut a page from their books section, and with it went the column. But the local coverage matters. It matters a lot, and especially now. So this is the column's continuation, where I'll be highlighting the books and bookstores, the writers, the poets, the translators, the publishers, the libraries, and journals, and events that make this region so active, exciting, and rich. Let’s keep the conversation going. Once a week, dispatches from literary New England.

Reproductive Justice, Reproductive Politics
“Analyzing youth criminalization through the reproductive justice framework enables us to see how policing and punishment are deeply entwined with the ability to create the families we want,” writes Chris Barcelos in their new book, Youth Organizing for Reproductive Justice: A Guide for Liberation (University of California). Barcelos, associate professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at UMass Boston, has created a potent primer on organizational strategies and techniques, looking at abortion access, sex education, teen pregnancy, trans lives, and the school to prison pipeline, demonstrating throughout “a vision of collective liberation that links bodily autonomy, self-determination, freedom from violence, support for alternative family formations, and the disruption of gender and sexual normativity.” Barcelos’s background as “a high school dropout turned teen parent turned university professor” informs their approach to the project, and the result is a clear-eyed, practical, motivating, and informative look at the ways youth (and those adults in allegiance with them) can organize to change the political, social, and cultural landscape of the country.

The Hundred-Year Book Debate
1925 saw the publication of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Franz Kafka’s The Trial, and Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. The Boston Public Library is hosting the Hundred-Year Book Debate in which three panelists debate the merits of each of these three books, making a case for each, arguing why theirs should take the prize. Journalist, critic, and children’s book author Betsy Groban will argue for Fitzgerald’s classic on moral decrepitude and the myth of the American dream. New Yorker staff writer and book critic James Wood will try to persuade us why Kafka’s labyrinth of bureaucratic traps is the book of the year. And Woolf’s modernist distillation of a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway will be championed by mystery writer and investigative reporter Hank Phillippi Ryan. The Hundred-Year Book Debate of 1925 takes place Tuesday, March 4, at 6 pm at the Boston Public Library, Rabb Hall, 700 Boylston Street, in Boston. It’s free. For more information, click here.

The T.S. Eliot Prize and Mass Cultural Council Grant Winners
In recent awards news, Peter Gizzi, who grew up in Pittsfield, Massachusetts and teaches at UMass Amherst, recently won the T.S. Eliot Prize for his latest collection, Fierce Elegy (Wesleyan). “All that is lovely / in words, even / if gone to pieces / all that is lovely / gone, all of it / for love . . . listen / the plan is / the body and / all of it for love,” Gizzi writes in “Creely Song” from the collection. The annual award, known as “the U.K.’s most prestigious prize for poetry,” honors the best new poetry collection published in the U.K. or Ireland. Judge Mimi Khalvati described Gizzi’s book as “infinitely sad yet resolute, and so fully alive in body and spirit,” saying the poems “revel in minutiae but also brave the large questions in a lyric sequence of transcendental beauty.” The book was selected from 187 submissions, and the winner receives £25,000.

The Mass Cultural Council recently announced the winners of its annual Grants for Creative Individuals program, supporting artists, culture bearers, and creative practitioners who advance creative expression across the state. The 2025 recipients in literature are: Adam Mahler of Cambridge; Amy Johnson of Somerville; Beatrice Alder of New Bedford; Blue Nguyen of Boson; Chaya Bhuvaneswar of Newton; Craig Blais of Springfield; Cristina Cortez of Easton; Daniel Pare of Easton; Enzo Surin of Swampscott; Evelyn Krieger of Sharon; Gemma Leghorn of Orleans; Gila Lyons of Newton; Haywood Fennell of Boston; Ide Thompson of Northampton; January Gill O’Neil of Beverly; Jason Adam Sheets of Cambridge; Jendi Reiter of Northampton; Juan Pablo Rivera of Northampton; Kasey LeBlanc of Swampscott; Kim Adrian of Boston; Lisa Borders of Hudson; Margaret M. Gullette of Newton; Matthew Modica of Boston; Maurice A Hernández of Pittsfield; Meera Subramanian of Barnstable; Mia McKenzie of Pelham; Nathan Tavares of Boston; Nina MacLaughlin (that’s me) of Cambridge; Pamela J. Loring of Hull; Rita Mookerjee of Worcester; Robert A. McKean of Newton; Santiago Colas of Easthampton; Sera Rivers of West Springfield; Shawnna Thomas of Boston; Susan Eisenberg of Boston; Taylor Mckinnon of Boston; Terry Carter of Randolph; Thierry Kehou of Provincetown; and Tochukwu Okafor of Avon. The writers will be awarded an unrestricted $5000 grant.

Books of Note Out This Week
Optional Practical Training by Shubha Sunder (Graywolf) with a launch at the Brookline Booksmith on March 7 at 7 pm.

On the Clock by Claire Baglin, translated from the French by Jordan Stump (New Directions)

Ultramarine by Mariette Navarro, translated from the French by Eve Hill-Agnus (Deep Vellum)

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