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:
In honor of World Poetry Day, TIME rounds up thirty portraits of poets from the Life Magazine archives, including Marianne Moore in front of a pair of elephants, Rod McKuen being nuzzled by a cat, and Langston Hughes on the steps of a Harlem brownstone.
An English class at Boston College is developing a virtual-reality game based on James Joyce’s modernist classic Ulysses. The game does not retell the famously complex novel, but instead allows players to explore some of the book’s most iconic locales, such as a military tower and a café in Paris. The game will be released in Dublin on June 16, or Bloomsday, the annual celebration of the novel. (Associated Press)
Robert Silvers, the founding editor of the New York Review of Books, died yesterday at the age of eighty-seven. Silvers, along with Barbara and Jason Epstein, Robert Lowell, and Elizabeth Hardwick, started the review in 1963. (Los Angeles Times)
Jennifer Schuessler examines how both liberals and conservatives, including, most recently, the alt-right, try to reference Jane Austen to bolster their political positions. (New York Times)
In an effort to offset losses in 2016, publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has begun laying off staff in both its educational and trade divisions. (Publishers Weekly)
“I don’t really understand what I’ve said until I’ve written it. I don’t know what I think about something until I’ve written it down, or found another piece of writing that can articulate it.... Our work as artists is exploring.” Critic Hilton Als discusses the painter Alice Neel, his process, and why he is drawn to the essay form. (Creative Independent)
Matthew Thorburn talks with poet Marianne Boruch about her image journal, spending “quality time with her poems,” and how writing a memoir was like free beer—“great fun, but rather sobering.” (Ploughshares)
BuzzFeed features thirty-one books to read this spring, including Tommy Pico’s poetry collection Nature Poem, Dan Chaon’s novel Ill Will, and Patty Yumi Cottrell’s novel, Sorry to Disrupt the Peace.
