Maya Angelou Dies at 86, Amazon Breaks Silence on Hachette Dispute, and More

by
Staff
5.28.14

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:

Poet, memoirist, and activist Maya Angelou died this morning at her home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The author of more than thirty books, including the influential 1969 memoir of the Jim Crow South, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, was eighty-six. (NPR)

Amazon has spoken out regarding the company’s ongoing dispute with Hachette in a blog post on its Kindle forum; the internet retailer is “not optimistic” that the two sides will resolve their differences in the near future. (Publishers Weekly)

The annual publishing convention BookExpo America begins today in New York City amid objections to the event’s exclusion of work published by and for people of color. (Associated Press)

Author Gillian Flynn will publish a novelized version of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet through publisher Hogarth’s series dedicated to fictional adaptations of the Bard's work. (Wall Street Journal)

The Poetry Archive, an online audio collection of nearly three hundred and fifty poets reading their own work, which is visited by two hundred thousand listeners per month, has launched a redesign of its website. (Guardian)

Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano recently criticized his own 1971 book, The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, which decried the ill-treatment of South and Central America by capitalist North Americans, saying that he found the book unreadable and unsuccessful in its attempt to describe the political situation of the region. (New York Times)

High school students in Detroit and Washington, D.C. have collaborated on a live presentation of their own poetry that incorporates digital media. (Metro Times)

The Paris Review presents an essay in translation about necks, originally written in Norwegian by novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard.