Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today’s stories:
Best-selling novelist Nicholas Sparks has been accused of racial, religious, and sexual discrimination in a federal lawsuit brought on Thursday. The complaint against Sparks was filed by Saul Hillel Benjamin, the former headmaster of the Epiphany School of Global Studies, a private school in North Carolina cofounded and funded by Sparks and his wife. Among other allegations, Benjamin’s complaint says the author sought to block the recruitment of black students and teachers, supported the bullying of LGBT students, and questioned Benjamin’s Jewish background and Quaker faith. (NPR)
Kirk Nesset, a prize-winning author, musician, and professor who has taught writing at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania, since 1995, has been arrested by the FBI on charges of child pornography. In an affidavit, the FBI said that an agent in Arizona last month traced images and video files shared in a peer-to-peer network to Mr. Nesset’s computer. Nesset waived his Miranda rights, and admitted to downloading the files. The author of six books, Nesset is a well-known figure in the literary world, having served as faculty for the Black Forest Writing Seminars and winning the 2007 Drue Heinz Literature Prize for his short story collection Paradise Road. (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)
Connecticut’s Westport Library recently acquired two humanoid robots, named Vincent and Nancy, that will be used to help teach coding and computer programming skills. The robots can also speak nineteen languages, kick a soccer ball, and do tai chi. (Wall Street Journal)
The Authors Guild, a group of more than 8,500 published writers whose mission is to “protect and support working writers,” went public on Thursday with its attempts to invite government scrutiny of Amazon’s business practices. “The Guild has consistently opposed Amazon’s recent and ruthless tactics of directly targeting Hachette authors, which have made these authors into helpless victims in a business dispute between two big corporations,” the Guild wrote on its website. “When a retailer, which sells close to half the books in the country, deliberately suppresses the works of certain authors, those authors are harmed, and we speak out.”
Meanwhile, a year into his purchase of the Washington Post, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos isn’t making many friends at the newspaper. Bezos, who has suppressed Amazon employees’ efforts to unionize, has turned his anti-labor ideas toward the Post, whose employees are represented by Local 32035. With the union’s contract set to expire at the end of this month, Bezos is pushing to freeze pensions and cut other benefits. On Thursday, Post employees demonstrated against the proposals outside the newspaper’s downtown Washington offices, waving signs that read “Bezo$” and “Another Wall Street Smash and Grab.” (Washington Post)
Rick Horgan, the former vice president and executive editor of Crown Publishing Group who was laid off by the company earlier this year, has named the vice president and executive editor at Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. (GalleyCat)
HarperCollins is giving its authors the chance to earn higher royalty rates by selling their books directly to customers through the company’s new direct-sales platform, which was launched on its website in July. (Publishers Weekly)
“I had a sort of ruthless, ‘I killed my darlings’ approach to it.” Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn talks to Rolling Stone about writing the screenplay for the film adaptation of her best-selling novel, which hits theaters nationwide today.
