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Led by council speaker Christine Quinn, members of the New York City Council recently honored poet John Ashbery for his “literary and cultural contributions” by designating April 7 as “John Ashbery Day” in the city.
Last month Businessweek, the Web site of the weekly business magazine, published a list of the ten best cities in the United States for artists, including creative writers. Los Angeles topped the list, followed by Santa Fe, New Mexico; Carson City, Nevada; New York City; Kingston, New York; Oxnard, Thousand Oaks, and Ventura, California; Nashville; Boulder, Colorado; San Francisco; and Nassau and Suffolk Counties in New York.
The Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the oldest continuously run poetry bookstore in the United States, was recently sold by owner Louisa Solano.
Fiction writers Deborah Eisenberg, Mary Gordon, Allan Gurganus, Jim Harrison, Harper Lee, and Annie Proulx were recently inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The 250-member organization was founded in 1898 to "foster, assist, and sustain an interest in literature, music, and the fine arts."
During the next several months, a number of festivals, exhibitions, and publications will mark the centennial of Samuel Beckett’s birth. Beckett, the poet, novelist, and playwright who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, was born in Dublin on April 13, 1906.
At this year’s London Book Fair, which was held in early March, novelist Margaret Atwood introduced the LongPen, a device she designed that allows authors to sign books for readers who are hundreds or even thousands of miles away.
Margaret Atwood's invention, the LongPen, which the author unveiled at last year's London Book Fair, will be used at a record store and several bookstores in the United States, Canada, and England, the London Free Press reported today.
