Round-Up: PEN America Responds to Trump, the Brooklyn Children’s Book Fair, and Johnny Cash’s Poems

From PEN America’s response to the election of a new collection of poems by Johnny Cash, here are last week’s biggest literary headlines.

• PEN America responded to the Donald Trump’s election victory. Suzanne Nossel, the executive director, wrote, “PEN America stands ready to play our essential role of defending free expression, elevating marginalized voices, and fostering dialogue across boundaries here at home and around the world.” It has also published the reactions of several writers, including Claire Messud, Jennifer Finney Boylan, and Wajahat Ali.

• The tenth Annual Brooklyn Children’s Book Fair took place on November 12. The free event took place at the Brooklyn Museum. It included storybooks, picture books, graphic novels, author reading, and original hands-on activities for all ages. Sallie Stutz, the museum’s vice director for merchandising and the fair’s founder, said, “Even ten or twenty years ago, Brooklyn had a lot of literary spots and authors, but I feel like the children’s book community has really grown. They look forward to gathering here.”

• Blue Rider Press has printed a collection of never-before-published poems by Johnny Cash. The collection, Forever Words: The Unknown Poems, was edited by Paul Muldoon, a Pulitzer Prize-winner poet and Princeton professor. Johnny Cash’s son John Carter Cash said, “I want people to have a deeper understanding of my father than just the iconic, cool man in black.” The book includes forty-one works from throughout Cash’s life and is illustrated with facsimile reproductions of Cash’s own handwritten pages.