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In the wake of China’s May 12 earthquake, both amateur and professional poets have contributed to a surge of poetry written in response to the disaster, prompting the publication of a number of anthologies, China.org.cn recently ported. The Wenchuan earthquake, named for the location of its epicenter in the nation’s Sichuan Province, killed nearly seventy thousand people and displaced an estimated five million more.
Thousands of library books at the University of Iowa, home to the Writers' Workshop, were in danger of being destroyed last week when the swollen Iowa River crested and flooded Iowa City. Located in the heart of the Iowa River valley, the university has not experienced such an event since since the devastating summer floods of 1993.
Nearly seven hundred years after his death, Dante Alighieri, Italy's most famous poet, finally has a clean criminal record. The city council of Florence voted earlier this week to revoke a death sentence placed on the poet in 1302.
A Vermont inn recently announced that it will host a series of four themed weekends aimed at giving Jane Austen aficionados a taste of the author's nineteenth-century lifestyle.
Denis Johnson, whose epic novel Tree of Smoke (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) won the 2007 National Book Award in fiction and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, will begin testing new literary waters this summer with a serial novel, written on deadline for and published in installments in Playboy.
