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President Obama announced yesterday that he has nominated Rocco Landesman, a theatre owner and producer, as the next chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Landseman, whose appointment must be confirmed by Congress, will fill the post recently vacated by Dana Gioia.
Poet Derek Walcott announced on Tuesday that he has withdrawn his bid to become the next professor of poetry at Oxford University.
Copper Canyon Press is the latest publisher to receive an International Literary Exchange Award from the National Endowment for the Arts. The public agency announced last Thursday that the press, based in Port Townsend, Washington, will receive $117,000 to support the translation, publication, and promotion of a bilingual anthology of Chinese poetry.
A search team on the Japanese island of Kuchino-erabu announced on Friday afternoon that a trail they had recently discovered showed signs that Craig Arnold, the forty-one-year-old poet who had been missing since April 26, suffered a leg injury, then fell from a cliff and died shortly thereafter.
Kelleys Island, Ohio, recently became the first community in the country to reach 100 percent participation in the National Endowment for the Arts’ Big Read program, saving the NEA’s literature director from having to eat his words—or, rather, Harper Lee’s words.
The National Book Foundation announced on Tuesday the recipients of its first Innovations in Reading Prize, given to individuals and organizations using innovative approaches to engage readers.
Albert Flynn DeSilver, the inaugural poet laureate of Marin County, California, has created a public project that invites the community to sit down with poetry.
Near the end of a recent interview for the New York Times Magazine, president Barack Obama briefly mentioned that he was reading Joseph O’Neill’s PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novel Netherland (Pantheon, 2008). The interview made no mention of whether the president was enjoying the book, just that he was reading it. But from the mouth of the popular president, that was enough.
Japanese authorities will continue the search for poet Craig Arnold, missing since April 26 on the Japanese island of Kuchino-erabu, for two additional days, according to the Facebook page administered by the poet's family.
With National Poetry Month officially wrapped up, Dan Wickett of the Emerging Writers Network has declared May “Short Story Month.” He plans to select three stories—one from a published collection, one from a print periodical, and one from an online journal—to read and blog about each day. If all goes well, Wickett will have covered just shy of one hundred pieces by month’s end.
