Posted on December 6, 2018 at 5:00 PM by Sadye Scott-Hainchek
A poet’s debut collection won’t be released after several colleagues accused her of stealing from others’ work.
Works submitted by Ailey O’Toole have been pulled from online publications as well as consideration for the Pushcart Prize.
The drama began Saturday, when poet Rachel McKibbens posted on Twitter that O’Toole had apologized for what she called paraphrasing lines from McKibbens’s work.
McKibbens rejected the apology and used stronger terms to describe what happened, and her disclosure led several other poets to discover that their own words were appearing in O’Toole’s work.
Readers have rallied around the affected poets, with the Guardian noting that McKibbens’s collection blud sold out on Amazon and landed in the top spot on the Hispanic-American poetry charts.
At the same time, if you check out O’Toole on Goodreads, you’ll find almost nothing but one-star reviews that call her a plagiarizer.
You can read the latest coverage of the scandal in the Guardian.
Categories: Today in Books