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The University of New Mexico Press, reportedly facing an operating deficit as a result of the current recession, recently announced layoffs and the possibility of outsourcing distribution, according to a strongly worded press release circulated yesterday.
The lobbying group Americans for the Arts, in conjunction with the Congressional Arts Caucus, which is comprised of nearly two hundred members of the House of Representatives from more than forty states, is in Washington, D.C. today to celebrate the twenty-second annual Arts Advocacy Day and to ask Congress to increase the annual appropriation for the National Endowment for the Arts. A recent omnibus appropriation bill included $155 million for the NEA, but the group plans to ask for $200 million.
The Academy of American Poets launches on Wednesday the fourteenth annual National Poetry Month, a thirty-day celebration of poetry in American culture. Throughout April, the organization will sponsor events in New York City and initiate poetry-sharing programs nationwide.
The fifth annual PEN Word Voices festival will kick off in New York City on April 28, featuring sixty events with writers from forty countries, PEN American Center announced on Wednesday.
Every Tuesday the literary trade paperback imprint will choose a new book (published by Picador, of course) and invite readers to discuss it via the social networking and microblogging service—in 140-character text messages called "tweets"—two weeks later.
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.
