Poetry News

Brooklyn: A Writer’s Paradise?

By Harriet Staff

Brooklyn, New York’s favorite supercool borough, has attracted more than just indie bands and rogue honeybee swarms. When British author Martin Amis purchased a home in Cobble Hill, The Economist reported on the writers, past and present, who have called Brooklyn home:

…To get a true feel for the artistic ferment taking place in Brooklyn, Mr Amis would have to climb several rungs down the literary food chain and sample the profusion of local journals, indie presses, bookshops and even home-grown writing programmes that are transforming this once-roughneck borough into what some locals have come to call New York’s own Rive Gauche.

Brooklyn has long been a home to writers. Walt Whitman hand-set the type for the first edition of “Leaves of Grass” in a print shop in Brooklyn Heights in 1855. And authors as varied as Hart Crane, W.H. Auden, Richard Wright, Norman Mailer and Carson McCullers all lived at various times on a single street overlooking the East River in Brooklyn Heights, as Evan Hughes chronicles in his book “Literary Brooklyn”.

Go here for the full article.

Posted in Poetry News on Monday, June 25th, 2012 by Harriet Staff.