Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today’s stories:

Former U. S. poet laureate Maxine Kumin [2] died yesterday at age eighty-eight. Kumin won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1973 for her book Up Country: Poems of New England. (San Francisco Chronicle)

Newly merged Penguin Random House will close two Penguin warehouses [3] as it restructures its warehouse and distribution network. The publishing giant distributes two million print books each day. (Shelf Awareness)

Laura Hazard Owen reports that Sony will quit the North American e-book market and hand over its Sony Reader customers to Kobo [4] in late March. (GigaOM)

Author Alexander Chee examines the nature of pervasive Internet outrage [5]. (DAME)

And Salon’s Laura Miller asks: “Is the literary world elitist? [6]”

If you’re trapped in the Polar Vortex [7], Joe Winkler looks at how the poetry of John Keats and Robert Burns may help. (Volume 1 Brooklyn)

Today is Charles Dickens’s birthday [8]. (Los Angeles Times)