Since she spent years living in between New York City and Alaska, Joan Kane's poetry crisscrosses two vastly different worlds. In this video interview, she described how these two places influenced her new book, "The Cormorant Hunter's Wife."

Kane was one of the ten writers honored at the 25th annual Whiting Writers' Awards last week. GalleyCat prowled the aisles of the 2009 Whiting Awards, interviewing a number of the winners about their writing lives, the recession, and the future of literature. The ten recipients each took home a $50,000 award for their literary efforts.

Here's more about the author: "Kane is Irish and Inupiaq Eskimo, with family from King Island and Mary’s Igloo, Alaska. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Harvard College and her M.F.A. from Columbia University ... In 2009 her play, 'The Gilded Tusk,' won the Anchorage Museum theater contest."

In a New Yorker blog post this week, James Surowiecki questioned the American Booksellers Association's "dubious" claims about "illegal predatory pricing" by Wal-Mart (WMT) in its Book Price War with Amazon.com (AMZN). Here's more: "[T]here's just no reason to believe that Wal-Mart is cutting prices now in order to raise them later: the company's entire history has been one of perpetual cost-cutting, even after it's become the country's dominant retailer."

GalleyCat has been tracking the stock performance of the major companies that influence the bookselling business. We created this chart with eight publicly-traded publishing stocks hand-picked by our readers--including company name, symbol, current stock price, and price increase or decrease at week's close.

-Name- -Symbol- -Last price- -Change-
The McGraw-Hill Co. MHP 29.32 -0.14
Books-A-Million, Inc. BAMM 8.15 0.23
Borders Group, Inc. BGP 2.06 -0.05
Amazon.com, Inc. AMZN 126.2 5.59
Barnes & Noble, Inc. BKS 17.05 0.18
Wiley John & Sons Inc. JW.A 36.5 0.22
Scholastic Corporation SCHL 25.3 0.09
News Corporation NWS 14.15 0.04
Google Inc. GOOG 551.1 2.45
Apple Inc. AAPL 194.34 0.31
Sony Corporation SNE 28.84 0.11

The as the ticker-tape parade for the Yankees winds down in New York City, Triumph Books is running off a 63,000-copy first print run of "The Best! Yankees Bring the World Series Title Back Home"--a rushed 128-page book about the team's 2009 World Series-winning season.

According to Publishers Weekly, Triumph will spend a considerable amount of money sending the short book to New York City bookstores via messenger service on Saturday morning. The publisher is a Random House imprint with offices in Chicago.

Here's more from the article: "Mitch Rogatz, Triumph Books publisher, explained that the press had put together two books--one done completely in-house on the Phillies, and the other done in collaboration with the New York Post on the Yankees. A printer also was lined up to go to work as soon as the last game ended...the book on the Phillies has been shelved--for now."

The very first issue of X-Men #1--sold for $101,000 at a Missouri rare comic book auction--apparently setting a world record for comic book pricing.

The 1963 comic was penned by Stan Lee and drawn by Jack Kirby. According to Digital Spy, the auction sold 3,000 comics for more than one million dollars, auctioning off an epic collection of comics inherited by an anonymous relative of a deceased comic book collector.

Here's more from the article: "According to Tina Weiman of Mound City Auctions, it is unknown whether the original owner knew how much the comics are worth. 'I don't think he necessarily knew the value of them,' she said. 'I don't know when he looked at them last. I know that that were pulled out from underneath the basement steps.'"

With over 2.3 million Americans currently incarcerated, prison outreach is a vital vocation. Today's guest on the Morning Media Menu was Jackson Taylor, the novelist and Mediabistro teacher who has directed PEN's Prison Writing Program for the last 20 years.

Taylor shared his experiences working with hundreds of imprisoned authors and creative writing mentors. The writing program will be celebrated on Monday at Breakout: Voices from Inside--a fundraising event with appearances by Mary Gaitskill, Eric Bogosian, and John Turturro.

Here's an excerpt from the interview: "[Some inmates] can't get their hands on pencil and paper, but still feel the urge and desire to express themselves in writing ... That's the thing that's really moving, when you see the desire is so strong in people. We believe that writing is a skill, and it can be practiced. Unlike many skills, writing well is useful. And it's useful in almost every avenue of life: employment, education, and daily life. It's also a skill that generates other skills."

As the national unemployment rate hits 10.2 percent, a new crop of six publishing jobs surfaced this morning (alongside eight other jobs earlier this week). Like a hardboiled gumshoe, GalleyCat has been investigating publishing work on the mediabistro.com job boards. For your resume-making pleasure, here are the new postings.

To begin, Penton Media seeks a Senior Editor, Registered Rep and R.A. Rapaport Publishing needs a Circulation Assistant. In addition, Scholastic is looking for a Product Manager.

Finally, Scholastic is also seeking a Statistical Analyst, a Director, User Experience/Interface/Site Construct, and a Book Clubs Coordinator. Here's more about that final job: "Coordinator will be responsible for reviewing each Book Club catalog, creating the order forms, and ensuring their accuracy. The Coordinator will research all promoted books to ensure that book titles and images are correct, and that titles and prices are consistent."

When Publishers Weekly released a series of Best Books of 2009 lists this week, the "Top Ten" list did not include any books by women authors. GalleyCat wrote about the ensuing controversy on Wednesday, as the founders of Women In Letters And Literary Arts (WILLA) passionately rejected the list.

The story generated a stream of Twitter posts and plenty of literary debate. Since that story, a number of other news outlets reported on the story, including the Guardian, NY Times, Salon, and Publishers Weekly.

Since Wednesday, WILLA's membership has increased by more than 1,000 supporters--more than 5,600 people now support the group's Facebook page. In a statement, Erin Belieu (pictured, via), director of the Creative Writing Program at Florida State University and WILLA co-founder, added these thoughts: "They know they're being blatantly sexist, but it looks like they feel good about that. I, on the other hand, have heard from a whole lot of people--writers and readers--who don't feel good about it at all."

The online writing site Scribd has been in the news over the last day as someone with the same name as Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan--the suspect held after yesterday's mass shooting at Fort Hood--had posted an essay about suicide bombings on the site.

The NY Times joined seven other news outlets writing about a FBI investigation into the work of a Scribd poster with the same name as the shooting suspect: "In one posting on the Web site Scribd, a man named Nidal Hasan compared the heroism of a soldier who throws himself on a grenade to protect fellow soldiers to suicide bombers who sacrifice themselves to protect Muslims."

Based on this newspaper speculation, the essay has been read over 4,000 times and generated 44 comments on Scribd, most of them from readers debating the identity of the essay writer. However, a simple SuperPages search turned up six different people named Nidal Hasan around the United States. As these online writing communities grow, they will invariably be mixed up in news stories--but it is difficult to connect these online personalities to a real writer.

The Book of Color for the day is The Vixen Manual: How to Find, Seduce, & Keep the Man You Want. Written by Karrine Steffans, bestselling author of The Vixen Diaries, the ultimate "man's-lady" gives the details on how to land and keep a man. Based on years of experience and learning, Steffans explains relationship woes for every version of the single woman.

Steffans explains major markers in relationships, from the moment you meet to deciding if he is worth your love and attention. The book also contains sidebars explaining various sexual tips and suggestions dubbed "Vixen Tips."

Karrine Steffans, former celebrity dater and video vixen, definitely has a no holds barred mentality and tells it like it is.

In this candid video interview, novelist John Irving confessed that his first novel, "Setting Free The Bears," would not be published in our 21st Century publishing industry.

In a new Big Think interview, he explained: "If I were twenty-seven and trying to publish my first novel today, I might be tempted to shoot myself...I think it's a lot tougher to be a first [time] novelist, to be an unknown novelist today than it was for me and so I worry about what's going to happen with those good, younger writers. But I don't think the book is in any particular peril, I think the book is going to survive."

The quote was part of a simple series of interviews with the novelist, each broken into easily digestible segments. Among other topics, he covered how writers should think about movies and why he can't leave the United States.

Today's Featured Book of the Day is Rainbow House, written by new author Janet Diaz-Bonilla. For her debut novel, Diaz-Bonilla took bits from her own life to make an inspiring story about internal suffering.

The story revolves around Camilla Miranda, a young woman who holds a dark secret. Her neighbor, Gomez, would visit her as she grew up and abused her sexually. He swore her to secrecy, and from this terrible experience, Camilla grew up to become a psychologist. She helps others with abusive relationships, but she herself had never engaged in a healthy relationship because of her personal trauma.

That all changes when Troy Mauvais enters her life and brings to the surface things long buried. Now she must face her demons from years ago.

Over at our sibling blog, FishbowlLA, Tina Dupuy interviewed a former LA Times editor about the dilemma facing every writer in the 21st Century: to blog or not to blog.

Richard Rushfield explained why he left his post at a national newspaper to serve as West Coast editor at Gawker: "There were so many times when you'd write a wonderful article for the LA Times, or break some news and it would just be met by the sound of crickets. When you are at the LAT you're at a place where even the website isn't in the central flow of the nation's cultural conversation. But at Gawker one is very much in and a part of that conversation and as one who is writing, in part at least to communicate, that's where you want to be."

Despite this new focus, Rushfield didn't lose his long-form chops. He also wrote a new book: "Don't Follow Me, I'm Lost: A Memoir of Hampshire College in the Twilight of the '80s."