More than 70 authors, including Pulitzer prize winners Jennifer Egan and Louise Glück, have come to the defend Jill Bialosky after she was accused of plagiarism by William Logan and The New York Times, saying that her “inadvertent repetition of biographical boilerplate was not an egregious theft intentionally performed”.
Last Week William Logan in the Tourniquet review accused her of stealing other he is quoted as saying that she “plagiarized numerous passages from Wikipedia and the websites of the Academy of American Poets and the Poetry Foundation” when writing biographical details of poets including Robert Louis Stevenson, Emily Dickinson and Robert Lowell. He added some passages from the book to buttress his point and analyzed them further that “many of Bialosky’s changes here and elsewhere – ‘barely’ for ‘seldom’, ‘verse’ for ‘poetry’, ‘unleashed’ for ‘gave rise to’, ‘total’ for ‘complete’ – are the slight, guilty revisions of the serial plagiarist”. The New York Times news story also went down the same lane as Mr. Logan and even quoted him.
The writer speaking at the Poetry Society of America said that she would correct any errors found in the book in future editions but pointed out that Logan took only small passages from the entire book and urged that it should not distract anyone who wants to read the work. Her publishers also voiced their support, naming her a unique editor and writer.
72 authors who describe themselves as “writers and friends of literature” have written to the New York Times to express their concern about the paper’s story. They said that “by giving a large platform to a small offence”, the story had “tainted the reputation of this accomplished editor, poet and memoirist”.
The letter was authored by Kimono Hahn and David Baker who have been edited by Bialosky. The other signatories also include Egan, Claire Messud, Robert Pinsky and Roxanne Robinson, also many have been published by WW Norton and edited by Bialosky. Egan and Glück are not however.
The letter says that the charges laid against Bialosky “refer to a handful of commonly known biographical facts gleaned from outside sources … Given the trust that is assumed between a writer and her readers, this mishandling is not something to shrug off. Yet it bears saying that Ms Bialosky’s inadvertent repetition of biographical boilerplate was not an egregious theft intentionally performed”.
Source: The Guardian
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