Daily News from Poets & Writers

Five authors are among this year's Celebrity 100, a ranking of the highest earning and most popular celebrities in the world, published annually by Forbes magazine.

Amazon.com recently optioned screen rights to Keith Donohue's best-selling debut novel The Stolen Child (Nan A. Talese, 2006). It is the online retailer's first venture into feature films and the creation of content not limited to its Web site.

Perseus Books Group announced yesterday that it had acquired Consortium Books Sales and Distribution, Inc., the company that provides distribution, sales, and marketing services to independent publishers such as Akashic Books, Copper Canyon Press, and Seven Stories Press.

Poet David Rivard recently won the Folger Shakespeare Library’s 2006 O. B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize. Rivard, whose most recent collection is Sugartown (Graywolf Press, 2006), received $10,000 and an invitation to read at the library in Washington, D.C.

The longlist of finalists for the first Dylan Thomas Prize, to be awarded biennially for a book of poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction by a writer under thirty, was recently announced in the late poet's hometown of Swansea, England.

Kathleen Blanco, the governor of Louisiana, recently vetoed a bill to designate “I Love My Louisiana” as the state poem. The twenty-three-line poem was written by seventy-two-year-old Prairieville resident James Ellis Richardson.

The true identity of the authors of Believeniks!, a nonfiction account of the New York Mets 2005 baseball season, published in April by Doubleday, was recently reported by New York Magazine. The pseudonymous authors, Harry Conklin and Ivan Felt, were revealed to be novelists Jonathan Lethem (Conklin) and Christopher Sorrentino (Felt).

The social networking Web site Gather.com recently launched a contest that offers creative writers a chance to sell their submissions through Amazon Shorts, a program developed by Amazon.com that sells short stories and essays in a digital format for forty-nine cents each.

Three independent bookstores in the San Francisco Bay area have recently closed due to declining sales.

The winners of the 2006 Independent Publisher Book Awards (the IPPYs) were recently announced. Given in sixty-five categories, the annual awards are intended to bring increased recognition to books published in the past year by independent and university presses as well as self-published titles.

The 2006 Guggenheim Fellowships were recently awarded to twenty-seven poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers.

The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis recently announced the winners of the 2006 McKnight Artist Fellowships. The $25,000 fellowships are given in alternating years to Minnesota poets and writers of fiction and literary nonfiction.