The US literary community is split, after the Boston Review’s poetry editors resigned over the magazine’s decision to retain the novelist Junot Díaz as fiction editor, despite allegations of sexual misconduct, with authors including Jennifer Weiner and Monica Byrne lining up to condemn the journal’s stance.
The Pulitzer prize-winning Dominican American novelist was accused last month of forcibly kissing the author Zinzi Clemmons; and the writers Monica Byrne and Carmen Maria Muchado have also spoken out about problematic encounters with Díaz. Their allegations prompted him to withdraw from the Sydney writers festival, where Clemmons had publicly confronted him, and to relinquish his role as chairman of the Pulitzer board as the prize body reviews the claims made against him.
The Boston Review, which has been running since 1975, announced on Tuesday that Díaz would remain its fiction editor, a position he has held for 15 years. Editors-in-chief Deborah Chasman and Joshua Cohen said in a statement that they had conducted their own investigation with women writers of colour, and had found no pattern of abuse.
“The objectionable conduct described in the public reports does not have the kind of severity that animated the #MeToo movement,” they wrote, and after a “careful review of the public complaints”, they concluded that there is not a “larger pattern of abusing power”.
Chasman and Cohen admit in their statement that “not everyone associated with Boston Review agrees with everything we say in this letter”. Shortly after it was published, the journal’s three poetry editors, Timothy Donnelly, BK Fischer and Stefania Heim resigned their positions. A joint statement from Donnelly, Fischer and Heim criticised the Boston Review’s “apparent arbitration of what constitutes inclusion in the #MeToo movement and its lack of attentiveness to power dynamics in a star-driven media and publishing landscape”.
An open letter from Vida supported by authors including Jennifer Weiner, Byrne and Daniel José Older, as well as booksellers and literary journalists, also raised concerns about the decision. The statement from Cohen and Chasman, the Vida letter says, “reads like a template for rationalising inaction, laying out point by point the logic our culture uses in its continued failure to prioritise the safety of women and non-binary people”.
Vida, an organisation that champions women’s writing, goes on to describe as as troubling “the idea put forth in Boston Review’s statement that there is a baseline of bad acts that must be reached in order for the editors to respond, and that Díaz hasn’t reached it”. The letter voices fears that the statement “will silence women and non-binary writers, especially those of colour, who may no longer feel safe submitting their writing, especially their fiction, to the Boston Review”.
Díaz’s response to the accusations made against him – which followed the novelist’s own revelation in an essay for the New Yorker that he had been raped as a child – came in the form of a statement to the New York Times last month, in which he said: “I take responsibility for my past … That is the reason I made the decision to tell the truth of my rape and its damaging aftermath … This conversation is important and must continue. I am listening to and learning from women’s stories in this essential and overdue cultural movement. We must continue to teach all men about consent and boundaries.”
