Daily News from Poets & Writers

Nicholas Hughes, the son of the late poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, committed suicide last Monday, forty-six years after his mother took her own life. According to his sister, poet Frieda Hughes, the forty-seven-year-old, who hanged himself in his Alaska home, had struggled with depression for some time.

President Barack Obama last week created a new position to oversee arts and culture in the Office of Public Liasion and Intergovernmental Affairs. Kareem Dale, who was previously named special assistant to the president for disability policy, will hold the new position under senior advisor Valerie Jarrett.

PEN American Center, the central U.S. outpost for the international writers organization, will welcome a new president this spring and bid farewell this summer to its longtime executive director.

The Center for Book Arts in New York City is celebrating the one hundredth anniversary of the Vandercook Proof printing press with a series of events and the publication of the limited edition Vandercook Book, a collaborative artist book featuring work created using the press.

The thirteenth annual Small Press Month, a nationwide celebration of the contributions of independent book publishers, is underway. Cosponsored by the New York Center for Independent Publishing, the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, and the Independent Book Publishers Association, the schedule of events includes readings, book launches, author appearances, and other events that shore up support for and promote unity among small presses.

The National Endowment for the Arts released a new study yesterday that shows the unemployment rate among the nation's working artists, including writers, hit 6 percent in the final quarter of 2008. The unemployment rate for writers and authors alone is slightly higher: 6.6 percent.

The township of Montclair, New Jersey, recently offered to host the financially beleagured Dodge Poetry Festival, a biennial event sponsored by the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Foundation. The festival, which was founded in 1986 in Waterloo Village, New Jersey, and moved to Hillsborough, New Jersey, in 2003, was suspended earlier this year.

The Twitter user claiming to be Maya Angelou has come clean as an impostor.

After bowing out of the Emirates Airline International Festival of Literature, author Margaret Atwood announced last Friday that she will be appearing at the event, via video.

The independent production company Werc Werk Works announced last Thursday that it has signed on to finance a feature film about the creation of and controversy surrounding Allen Ginsberg’s long poem "Howl."

The New Yorker on Tuesday announced the creation of a book club, or, as the editors prefer to think of it, a "readers’ cooperative—a standing invitation to roll up your sleeves and dig deep into a book, and see what together we uncover."