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:

Today is Poem in Your Pocket Day, established by the Academy of American Poets in 1996 as part of National Poetry Month. The Boston Globe’s James Sullivan makes a case for carrying hip-hop lyrics in addition to the lines of Walt Whitman [2].

Meanwhile, for the remainder of the month a Brooklyn, New York–based project called NYCorrespondence has opened an international call for mail art [3] using the postcard fuction of iPhone’s Poetics app.

Charles Simic remembers the Stony Brook World Poetry Conference of 1968 [4], a meeting of more than a hundred poets with vastly different aesthetic sensibilities that culminated in a fistfight. (New York Review of Books)

Actress Jessica Chastain has been tapped to play a character based on Marilyn Monroe [5] in an adaptation of the Joyce Carol Oates novel Blonde. Filming is scheduled to begin in August. (IndieWire)

Singer and songwriter Paul Simon joined a musical tribute to the late Seamus Heaney [6] last night in Dublin, where earlier in the day a commemorative tapestry dedicated to the poet was unveiled in the city’s airport. (Irish Independent)

Novelist Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting, has joined a team of graphic novelists to create a work of dystopian fiction set in Scotland [7], which will be released at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in August. (Guardian)

Novelist and memoirist Elizabeth Gilbert has put her Frenchtown, New Jersey, house up for sale by owner [8]. (New York Times)

Kenyan memoirist Binyavanga Wainaina discusses his life as an openly gay man in Africa [9] at a time when anti-gay violence in the country is on the rise. (Here & Now)

David Sedaris has booked a June 11 stop [10] at the newly opened Literati Bookstore [11] in Ann Arbor. (MLive)