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A new program on youth slam poetry is set to debut on HBO next month. The seven-part series "New Voices," narrated by rapper Queen Latifah, follows forty-four slam teams from seven cities as they advance toward the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival held last year in Washington, D.C.
Responding to assertions by the Authors Guild that Amazon's Kindle 2 device, with its text-to-speech function, violates audiobook rights, and Random House's subsequent deactivation of the function for its e-book titles, nine disability groups last week urged publishers to recognize the benefits of the software, which enables books to be spoken in a computerized voice, to people who are blind or suffer from dislexia or other disabilities, and even those who use English as a second language.
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.
Half a year has passed since David Foster Wallace's death, and interest in the late author’s distinctive work continues to mount.
The battle between Sony and Amazon for an edge in the digital books market just got a little more interesting: Five weeks after Amazon unveiled its Kindle 2 e-book reader, Sony is set to announce today a deal with Google that will make a half million public domain books available on its Reader e-book device.
Six months after Howard Junker announced that he would be retiring, the editor of ZYZZYVA has rescinded his resignation. In a message posted last month on the journal's blog, Junker wrote that the decision was based on several factors, including his enduring love for the journal he's edited for the past quarter century, the inability to find an appropriate successor, and a change in his personal retirement plans. "My retirement kitty is not as robust as it once was," he wrote.
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.
Novelist Tom Perrotta visited the University of New Hampshire in Durham as part of its Writers Series on an early March afternoon that was sunny enough for New Englanders to shed their wool caps and warm enough for the giant sand-filled snow banks that lined the roads to recede ever so slightly.
The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded a grant worth a little more than two hundred thousand dollars to the Poetry Collection at SUNY, Buffalo, that will allow the Libraries department to digitize and catalogue its audio collection.
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.
