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:
HarperCollins has acquired the rights to the majority of titles published by Newmarket Press, an independent publisher of film-related books. Esther Margolis, the founder of Newmarket Press, will join HarperCollins’ two-year-old entertainment-centered imprint, It Books. (Hollywood Reporter)
Joseph Lombardi, Barnes & Noble's Chief Financial Officer, resigned this past Friday. (Wall Street Journal)
To entice early adopters to purchase the new Kindle Fire, Amazon has launched a trade-in policy for older Kindles. (Los Angeles Times)
On the occasion of the paperback release of Lan Samantha Chang's All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost, the director of the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop sits down with fellow Iowa graduate and best-selling novelist Curtis Sittenfeld to discuss the state of the MFA program in America, the peculiarities of the Iowa experience, and the hazards of early success. "I think that when you’re a young writer—and often young writers’ first books are about their identity and their life—and you suddenly discover that information is public, and, moreover, that it’s a product, it can be really disconcerting." (Salon)
Frieda Hughes, the daughter of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, writes in the Guardian about her mother's inclination toward the visual arts. An exhibition of Sylvia Plath's drawings opens at the Mayor Gallery in London on November 2.
This weekend the New York Times published found poetry culled from the Missed Connections section of Craigslist written by Occupy Wall Street's more lovelorn participants: "I was all dressed in blue for a reason. Standing in front of Capitol One Bank..."
Meanwhile, literary journal n+1 has created a new publication, Occupy. On its Facebook page, the editors write: "With the help of Astra Taylor (Examined Life; Zizek!) and Sarah Leonard of Dissent, n+1 magazine editors have put together a forty-page history, both personal and documentary, and the beginning of an analysis of the first month of the occupation."
October 28 marks the 125th birthday of the Statute of Liberty. To help celebrate, Poets House, in collaboration with the National Park Service and Twitter, invites the public to compile a new poem, inspired by the Emma Lazarus sonnet, "The New Colossus," which is engraved on a bronze plaque inside the statue. (DNAInfo)
