Author and New Yorker staff writer Jelani Cobb has been named the new dean of the Columbia School of Journalism. Cobb, who has worked at Columbia since 2016 and is currently the director of the Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights, is the author of The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress, To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic, and other books.
Patricia Lockwood has won the £20,000 Dylan Thomas prize for her first novel, No One Is Talking About This.
“We live in a big science fiction novel we are all writing together”: at the New York Times, Alexandra Alter profiles the novelist Kim Stanley Robinson. The author, whose latest book is The High Sierra: A Love Story, says he has stopped writing space fantasies—in works like The Ministry of the Future, released in 2020, he addresses how we might face real cataclysms on Earth, like climate change.
Poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib, in his role as editor-at-large at Tin House, has acquired When They Tell You to Be Good, Prince Shakur’s memoir about growing up Black, queer, and closeted in Ohio.
Bono’s memoir Surrender, which was acquired seven years ago by the late, legendary Knopf editor Sonny Mehta, is scheduled to be released in November.
This week in New York, Geoff Dyer will participate in two events to celebrate The Last Days of Roger Federer, his new meditation on tennis, art, repetition, and time. On Tuesday at 7pm, Dyer will appear with pianist and author Jeremy Denk at McNally Jackson; and on Thursday at 7:30, he will discuss his work with novelist Sam Lipsyte at Greenlight Bookstore.