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:
Margot Adler, an NPR journalist for three decades and author of the memoir Heretic's Heart, died at her home in New York City yesterday after a battle with cancer. She was 68. (NPR)
Kaitlin Roig-DeBellis, a Connecticut teacher who helped save students' lives during the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, will publish her memoir, Choosing Hope: Moving Forward From Your Life’s Darkest Hour, with Putnam next spring. Author Robin Gaby Fisher is assisting in the writing. (Washington Post)
Singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams’s forthcoming double studio album, Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone, includes a song created using a poem written by her father, the poet Miller Williams. (Rolling Stone)
An Amazon employee may have crashed a recreational drone into Seattle’s Space Needle observation tower recently. While flying drones for commercial purposes is illegal, several companies, including Amazon, are seeking regulatory approval from the Federal Aviation Administration to use drones in order to replace traditional shipping methods. (Hill, CNBC)
Nearly a week and a half after the launch of Amazon’s subscription e-book service, Kindle Unlimited, Publisher’s Weekly assesses the reactions of the press, publishers, and other subscription services, such as Oyster and Scribd (featured in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine).
Meanwhile, Oyster’s full catalogue of e-books—formerly accessible only through an app—is now available on the web and mobile browsers. The list includes several backlist titles from Simon & Schuster, who partnered with the e-book subscription service in May. (GalleyCat, Forbes)
In reply to an article by Aimee Phan published in Talking Writing this past February, seven writers and scholars respond to and expand upon the novelist’s argument that mainstream reviewers largely ignore books by writers of color. (International Examiner)
Author Lara Pawson highlights five canonical texts—including José Eduardo Agualusa’s novel Creole and Ondjaki’s novella Good Morning Comrades—to initiate readers with the culture, politics, and history of Angola. (I. B. Tauris)
