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Apple reports selling a milllion iPads; Kent State offers Peace Stanzas on the fortieth anniversary of its campus shootings; Nikki Giovanni pledges her copyrights to Virginia Tech; a Portland, Oregon, bookstore and all its contents are destroyed by a fire; and other news.
Applications for the Oxford Professor of Poetry post close this week; a new Allen Ginsberg photography exhibit opens at the National Gallery of Art; an alleged Catcher in the Rye sequel gets another day in court; and other news.
Back then, I didn't have time for Poets & Writers. Fine, I was part of a panel discussion it sponsored, went to get-togethers: awfully smart people, high-minded yet down to earth. But I was serving on the boards of PEN and Mystery Writers of America. Enough. I'd learned that while being a "living American novelist" was exhilirating, being out there depleted my energy for fantasy and work, the two activities that made me a writer in the first place. So sorry, P&W.
In the third installment of our series Inside Indie Bookstores, contributor Jeremiah Chamberlin travels to Chicago to talk with Linda Bubon and Ann Christophersen, co-owners of Women & Children First.
The Poetry Society of America, the oldest poetry organization in the country, is marking its centennial this year with a number of special events that are being held across the country.
Since last fall, an Alameda, California–based start-up has been blending digital text, images, video, and social networking to produce what it calls "vooks" (a portmanteau word formed from video and book), which can be accessed through any Web browser or downloaded to mobile devices via Apple's iTunes Store.
Curbstone Press, the independent, nonprofit publisher that for more than three decades published international literature in Willimantic, Connecticut, and Northwestern University Press in Chicago agreed late last year to form a partnership.
The winner of the twenty-five-thousand-dollar Bellwether Prize for an unpublished novel manuscript has been announced. Barbara Kingsolver—author of novels including The Bean Trees (Harper & Row, 1988) and The Lacuna (Harper, 2009) and the locavore memoir Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (HarperCollins, 2007)—has selected the manuscript "Running the Rift" by Naomi Benaron of Tucson as the recipient of the biennial award, which includes publication by Algonquin Books. Also judging were inaugural Bellwether winner Donna Gershten and Algonquin editor Kathy Pories.
Benaron's novel, according to Kingsolver, "engages the reader with complex political questions about ethnic animosity in Rwanda and so many other issues relevant to North American readers." The prize, which is celebrating its tenth anniversary, is given to recognize a first work of literary fiction that speaks to social justice issues.
"In my writing," Benaron said in a press release, "what has always mattered most is to carry the human consequences of injustice to the reader’s heart and thus in some small way, bring healing." The author, whose pursuits beyond writing include orthopedic massage, seismology, and the Ironman Triathlon, also works with African refugees in her community and women writers in Afghanistan, through the Afghan Women's Writing Project online.
The 2008 Bellwether Prize–winning novel, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky by Heidi Durrow, was released last month, and the next competition will open in 2011.
Crown Publishing cuts two imprints and regroups; Amazon sends another volley in the e-book pricing wars; an Indiana high school bans Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announces plans to release Philip K. Dick's philosophical writings; and other news.
