Some things that caught our attention this week.

• Joy Williams has won the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. “Joy Williams’s short stories are, sentence to sentence, incandescent, witty, alarming, often hilarious while affecting seeming inadvertence (but not really) in their powerful access to our human condition,” said Richard Ford, a judge for this year’s prize.

• For National Poetry Month, the Washington Post paired ten designers with ten poets to animate their poems. The poets featured are Kevin Young, Edward Hirsch, Mary Karr, Dunya Mikhail, Nick Flynn, John Yau, Patricia Lockwood, Michael Robbins, Tracy K. Smith, and Victoria Chang.

• Staffing changes:
  Marilynne Robinson, Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist and National Humanities Medal recipient, is retiring from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop after 25 years of teaching at the institution. “She’s irreplaceable,” said Lan Samantha Chang, Iowa Writers’ Workshop Director, “You could make the argument that she is the most distinguished writer in the United States right now.”

  Claudia Rankine, AWP16 keynote speaker and author of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award–winning Citizen, will leave the University of Southern California to join the faculty at Yale University in the fall. “I’m positively over the moon that Claudia Rankine is joining Yale’s faculty,” African American Studies Department Chair Jacqueline Goldsby said. “Rankine’s a tremendous talent. It’s thrilling to bring a poet working at the peak of her powers to teach here. Our problem will be a great one to have: how to manage these course enrollments.”