Starrett Poetry Prize winner shares insight into hip hop Nate Marshall, 2014 winner of UPP’s Agnes Starrett Lynch Poetry Prize for his forthcoming collection Wild Hundreds, is also among the editors of the new release The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop. The book was recently highlighted in the Lambda Literary Review. The article includes comments from Marshall and his co-editors. “I think the reality of hip hop is that women and queer people and a lot of folks who we think about being in the margins have always been at the center of the culture,”…

Poet Nathalie Handal, author of The Republics, combines her love of cities and books in a monthly series called “The City and the Writer,” for the organization Words without Borders. “I have a passion for cities, their irresistible unrest, the way they make you feel unsettled yet welcomed,” she explained. “I also have a passion for books. And, as we all know, the two go hand-in-hand. It’s hard not to think of Prague when one mentions Milan Kundera. Just as it’s difficult when one mentions the mystical Tangiers to not think of Paul Bowles and his expatriate life among the…

As Cuba and the United States work to normalize relations, we feature a number of books on the island nation. Here’s a sampling: Queloides: Race and Racism in Cuban Contemporary Art Edited by Alejandro de la Fuente and Elío Rodriguez Valdés   Grupo Antillano: The Art of Afro-Cuba Edited by Alejandro de la Fuente   The Cuban Embargo: The Domestic Politics of an American Foreign Policy Patrick Haney and Walt Vanderbush   The Cuban Economy Archibald Ritter  

White Spots— Black Spots Difficult Matters in Polish-Russian Relations, 1918–2008 Edited by Adam Daniel Rotfeld and Anatoly Torkunov RUSSIAN HISTORY/ POLISH HISTORY   “A remarkable book. Analyzes most of the big issues between the countries, from the Polish-Soviet war following the Bolshevik revolution, through the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland in September 1939, the mass murder of thousands of Polish officers by Soviet security forces at Katyn in 1940, all the way to relations between Putin’s Russia and today’s Poland, a leading member of NATO and the EU. . . . This is a specific Polish-Russian story, but we all…

Brigitte Le Normand, author of Designing Tito’s Capital: Urban Planning, Modernism, and Socialism in Belgrade, shares some of her favorite places in the former Yugoslavia. Brigitte offers a vast array of locations, from a hotel where one can relax over coffee and pastry, to an outdoor market! Having studied the history of Yugoslavia for more than a decade, I’ve had the fortune to travel extensively in this beautiful region, primarily in Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia Hercegovina. I occasionally get requests for travel recommendations, which led me to reflect on my most memorable experiences. I present them to you here, with…