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:
Harvard has announced that Jill Abramson, the recently ousted executive editor of the New York Times, will join the university faculty as a visiting lecturer in the English department for the 2014-2015 academic year, teaching narrative nonfiction to undergraduate students. (New York Times)
Toby Mundy, the founder, publisher, and chief executive officer of Atlantic Books, has announced he will leave the Grove imprint on June 30. (Bookseller)
Author Hugh Howey, whose series of self-published thrillers became a huge commercial success, recently partnered with online writing platform Wattpad to sponsor a fan-fiction writing contest based on Howey’s novel Half Way Home. (GalleyCat)
As part of a project to revise the definition of every word in the Oxford English Dictionary, the latest quarterly update of the volume, released today, includes revised definitions for a number of words relating to World War I, including demob, foxhole, and cootie. (Irish Times)
Poets House, a national poetry library in New York City, is currently hosting an exhibition of work showcasing the work of a painter whose subjects included many New York poets of the late 1960s and early 1970s. A Painter and His Poets: The Art of George Schneeman is open until September 20. (Hyperallergic)
Novelist Zadie Smith recently gave the commencement address at the New School in New York City, where she encouraged graduates to listen intently to the conversations they hear while commuting. “If it weren’t for the New York and London subway systems,” she said, “my novels would be books of blank pages.”
Melville House supplies the viewpoints of several independent booksellers regarding the ongoing battle between Amazon and Hachette.
Open Culture has published the report cards of authors E. E. Cummings, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, and Anne Sexton.
