LitHub Daily: January 14, 2016

• A brief history of book illustration: where it’s been, where it could go… | Literary Hub
• Margaret Atwood on watching her speculative fiction become reality, “however many shades of grey,” and drinking blood. | Broadly
• Eileen Myles assures us she will serve as president if elected and that she has never said anything as forgettable as “Make America Great Again.” | The New York Times Magazine
• Ta-Nehisi Coates, Sheila Heti, George Saunders, and (many) others share their “breakthrough moments.” | New York Magazine
• “Their identities were magnified by the other.” Patti Smith on the inspiring love and artwork of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. | Smithsonian Magazine
• Devotion vs. derivation: On the claims that Oscar Wilde plagiarized poetry. | The Public Domain Review
• On Henry James’s shimmering and charming memoirs. | The New Yorker
• Danez Smith on his “miraculous book of little failures,” untinged joy, and the creation of myths. | Public Books
• Today in awards: the winners of the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature and the National Jewish Book Award, as well as the longlist for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. | APALA, Jewish Book Council, Arabic Fiction
• C.D. Wright, a much-accoladed and defining American poet, died this Tuesday at age 67. | Academy of American Poets

Also on Literary Hub: Interview with a gatekeeper: editor-cum-publisher Lee Boudreaux on the start of her own imprint · Tamas Dezso photograph the ghost zones of a fading Romania · From Katherine Zoepf’s Excellent Daughters: The Secret Lives of Young Women Who Are Transforming the Arab World