Lit Hub Daily: March 29, 2021

• How working in the thick of the Civil War helped Walt Whitman realize he had (even) more to contribute than poetry. | Lit Hub Biography

  Article continues after advertisement

• “The fear of leaving my mother behind, as I board a train going somewhere she’s never been, will probably never go.” Jennifer De Leon on writing as a bridge between mothers and daughters. | Lit Hub Memoir

• “If a kidney could be moved, alive, from one body to the next, why not a heart? Why not a lung?” Brandy Schillace on the story of the first successful organ transplant. | Lit Hub Science

• “We forget that love is revolutionary.” Tiya Miles on the suffering and resilience of four Black women during slavery and emancipation. | Lit Hub History

• Michael Shaikh considers one of the forgotten casualties of Myanmar’s genocide: Rohingya food culture. | Lit Hub

  Article continues after advertisement

• The great Beverly Cleary died Thursday at 104. | NPR

• The Bell Jar, The Argonauts, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and more rapid-fire book recs from Gabriela Garcia. | Book Marks

• Timothy Brennan pays tribute to Edward Said, whose “politics belonged to more than books.” | Lit Hub Biography

• “A poem is the most efficient form of time travel.” Kevin Young discusses his new role as the director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. | Wall Street Journal

• If you want to read something with the effect of “crackling conversation in a warm, welcoming room,” try Laurie Colwin’s books. | Los Angeles Times

• A.E. Osworth talks to the editors of the poetry anthology We Want It All about trans poetics, collectivity, and writing about the self. | Guernica

  Article continues after advertisement

• “We had to make this big to succeed.” Hear from the Amazon warehouse workers pushing for a union in Bessemer, Alabama. | The New Republic

• A conversation with Pádraig Ó Tuama, the creator of Poetry Unbound—a podcast that feels “like descending into a bubble bath.” | Vulture

• Erika Kobayashi embarks on a journey through time, guided by the diaries of Anne Frank, Izumi Shikibu, and her own father. | Lit Hub

• “I feel so often that that first sentence is the most terrifying sentence to put down at the start of a writing day.” R.O. Kwon on her creative process and the differences between fiction and nonfiction. | The Creative Independent

• “I am always, always, always kind of searching for a way to make sense of the funeral or the celebratory dance of letting someone go.” Read an excerpt from Hanif Abdurraqib’s new book and an interview with the poet and critic. | Vice

Also on Lit Hub: Raymond Antrobus’s new poem “The Perseverance” • Read from Michael Deforge’s latest graphic novel, Heaven No Hell