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:
Radio Free Europe explains how an obscure nineteenth-century Kazakh poet, Abai, has become an unlikely symbol of the protests opposing Putin's return to power in Russia.
Meanwhile, the New York Daily News has more on the arraignment of poet Joshua Clover, who faces a possible jail sentence after participating in an Occupy Wall Street protest at UC Davis. Alexander Nazaryan writes that Clover, "a California native with two volumes of poetry to his name, is reminiscent of poets like the Soviet Union's Joseph Brodsky or Chile's Pablo Neruda, for whom the life of the poet was inherently political."
In Mexico, following his son's vicious 2011 murder, poet Javier Sicilia has set aside writing to combat drug violence. (Huffington Post)
Forbes features Jeff Mayersohn, the person who (with the help of an Espresso Book Machine) saved Harvard Bookstore from oblivion.
The Guardian reports that the mysterious lover Federico García Lorca directed his sonnets to in his last year has been revealed. Fascists executed Lorca in 1936, "shot along with two anarchist bullfighters and a one-legged schoolteacher." Lorca's young love was the writer Juan Ramírez de Lucas, who held onto a box of mementos of their relationship, including a diary, until his death in 2010.
The Awl asks a host of writers, including Ben Choi, Maile Meloy, and Adelle Waldman: "What are the best audiobooks for a road trip?"
A new study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests readers of fiction may model behavior on a favorite character. (Guardian)
And for Mother's Day, the Los Angeles Times asks several writers who are also new mothers what books they're enjoying.
