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:
The poet and Belarussian PEN Center president Vladimir Neklyayev was detained by police yesterday as part of a "coordinated series of raids on the homes and offices of a number of
writers, journalists, and activists" in Minsk. (Press Release)
The rock band Guns N' Roses published a vook on Wednesday. (New York Times)
The Audubon Zoo in New Orleans is currently hosting an exhibit called the "Language of Conservation," curated by Mark Doty, the zoo's poet in residence, and featuring thirty-seven poetry installations tucked into the zoo's landscape.
A new BBC film will portray Charles Dickens's secret love affair with an eighteen-year-old actress. "Here was this man who had a wife and ten children and for fifteen years he had an affair," a producer for the film said. "His stories described the world as he saw it, and yet he was living a lie." (Telegraph)
As one major election draws to a close in Britain, another starts heating up. The eleven candidates for Oxford's professor of poetry post are already slinging arrows at the ivory tower of academia, mud at each other, and proposing slam poetry contests. (Guardian) The Independent has a nice roundup of the field.
Poetry Trust and the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club have teamed up to appoint Matt Harvey the first official Championships Poet of Wimbledon. Harvey, a well-known poet in the U.K., will write a poem a day for during the two-week tennis tournament. (Guardian)
Amazon announced the creation of a second publishing imprint, AmazonCrossing, "which will introduce readers to emerging and established authors from around the world with translations of foreign language books." In other Amazon news, the online giant plans to release a Kindle app for Android, "Google's popular and fast-growing mobile phone operating system," this summer. (Publishers Weekly)
Vice President Joseph Biden received a signed first-edition of James Joyce's "Anna Livia Plurabelle," a chapter in Finnegan's Wake, as a gift from a New Jersey Democrat last year. (Associated Press)
