Category: reading

  • 2014 in reading

    I set out this year to make my reading a bit more diverse. I fell a tad short of my goal for women writers making only 39.6% when I was aiming for 40% but had 13.5% non-white. I ended up choosing my next book to read 10.8% of the time in pursuit of these numbers.…

  • We got more or less diverse poets (depending on how you look at it)

    In the aftermath of some of the discussion about diversity in publishing, I thought I’d check how this year’s Best American Poetry stacked up against last year’s for diversity. There were 73 poets in the 2014 anthology compared to 76 in the 2013. In 2014, 31.5% of the poets had appeared in the three previous…

  • A year of reading

    So in 2013, I ended up reading a total of 114 books. Some interesting statistics along the way:  27.2% were written by women. Asians and Latinos each made up 2.6%. Blacks were 1.8%. I find these numbers to be rather disgraceful. 40.4% were for my MFA.  Two were in Spanish. Eleven were translated (from French,…