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:
Bana Alabed, the seven-year-old Syrian refugee who gained widespread attention on Twitter for giving harrowing glimpses of life under siege in Aleppo, announced she has landed a book deal. Simon & Schuster will publish Alabed’s memoir, Dear World, this fall. (CBS News)
The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a division of the New York Public Library in Harlem, has acquired James Baldwin’s archive. Researchers will have access to his drafts, notes, and manuscripts, but his personal correspondence will not be available for another twenty years. (New York Times)
Speaking of James Baldwin, a new book from the Library of Congress celebrates the library’s massive card catalogue, which includes cards from Baldwin, Walt Whitman, William Faulkner, and many other famous authors. (NPR)
“Let it be a book, rising from the ashes.” An anonymous blogger is leading a campaign to restore the Mosul University Library in Iraq, which was destroyed in 2014 by Islamic State militants. (BBC News)
A recently discovered batch of poet Sylvia Plath’s letters to her therapist, dating from 1960 to a week before her death in 1963, reveals allegations of domestic abuse by her husband, Ted Hughes. (Guardian)
Fiction writer Paul Vidich recommends eight great books set in Cuba, including works by Ernest Hemingway, Alejo Carpentier, and more. (Electric Literature)
Ozy highlights five contemporary women poets, including Sharon Olds, Solmaz Sharif, and Evie Shockley, who inspire resistance and whose “voices resonate at the crossroads of the personal and the political, examining the past to illuminate the present.”
