Poet Jill Bialosky Faces Plagiarism Accusations Over New Memoir
Image by Courtesy of Simon & Schuster
By Talya Zax October 4, 2017
Poet Jill Bialosky, currently an editor at W.W. Norton and Company, has been accused of plagiarism in her recent memoir from Simon & Schuster “Poetry Will Save Your Life.”
The accusations, made by poet and critic William Logan in the Tourniquet Review, center on Bialosky’s brief biographies, in the memoir, of poets whose work she discusses; Logan writes that Bialosky “has plagiarized numerous passages from Wikipedia and the websites of the Academy of American Poets and the Poetry Foundation.” Among the examples quoted were paragraphs on Robert Louis Stevenson, Louise Glück, and Sylvia Plath. (The last of these, a passage on Plath’s “Poppies in October,” Logan alleged to have been plagiarized from Helen Vendler’s book “Last Looks, Last Books.”)
At the time of publication, Atria Books, the Simon & Schuster imprint that published “Poetry Will Save Your Life,” had not responded to a request for comment.
The book, released this past August, was included in one of the Forward’s 2017 book guides. Bialosky’s previous books include the 2011 memoir “History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life,” four books of poetry, most recently “The Players” (2015), and two novels, including “The Life Room” (2007).
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
