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:
Two Sylvia Plath scholars have discovered two unknown poems by the poet, “To a Refractory Santa Claus” and “Megrims,” both written in 1956. The pair also found several unknown poems by Plath’s husband, Ted Hughes, as well as unseen photos of the couple. (Guardian)
U2 has been projecting poetry onstage during the revival tour of their 1987 album, Joshua Tree, which kicked off earlier this month. A fan website reports that the band has displayed poems by Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Elizabeth Alexander, Lucille Clifton, Walt Whitman, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Alberto Ríos. (UVA Today)
The Los Angeles Times goes inside the Ripped Bodice, the only U.S. bookstore that exclusively sells romance books. Sisters Bea and Leah Koch opened the store in Los Angeles in March 2016 after raising $90,000 on Kickstarter.
Hisham Matar has won the Rathbones Folio Prize for his memoir, The Return: Fathers, Sons, and the Land in Between. The annual £20,000 prize, formerly known as the Folio Prize and given exclusively to fiction books, is now given for a book in any genre written in English and published in the United Kingdom in the previous year.
Ed Caesar reports on the vigil held on Tuesday in Manchester for the twenty-two people who died in the bombing outside the Ariana Grande concert on Monday night, and how poet Tony Walsh held thousands rapt with the reading of his poem “This Is the Place.” (New Yorker)
Amazon Books opens today in New York City in Columbus Circle. A second brick-and-mortar Amazon store, located across the street from the Empire State Building, is in the works. (Publishers Weekly)
Poet Brian Sonia-Wallace has been named the inaugural Mall of America writer-in-residence. Sonia-Wallace will spend five days in the mall in June and write twenty-five poems a day inspired by the mall. (Star Tribune)
The Atlantic explores why sales have dropped at Marvel—not because readers are unwilling to read comics with diverse characters, as one Marvel executive suggested back in March—but because the company floods the market with new and relaunched series, creates inconsistent series by constantly reassigning its artists, and inadequately markets new titles.
