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:
Margot Adler, an NPR journalist for three decades and author of the memoir Heretic's Heart, died at her home in New York City yesterday [2] after a battle with cancer. She was 68. (NPR)
Kaitlin Roig-DeBellis, a Connecticut teacher who helped save students' lives during the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, will publish her memoir, Choosing Hope: Moving Forward From Your Life’s Darkest Hour [3], with Putnam next spring. Author Robin Gaby Fisher is assisting in the writing. (Washington Post)
Singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams’s forthcoming double studio album, Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone, includes a song created using a poem written by her father [4], the poet Miller Williams. (Rolling Stone)
An Amazon employee may have crashed a recreational drone into Seattle’s Space Needle [5] observation tower recently. While flying drones for commercial purposes is illegal, several companies, including Amazon, are seeking regulatory approval from the Federal Aviation Administration [6] to use drones in order to replace traditional shipping methods. (Hill, CNBC)
Nearly a week and a half after the launch of Amazon’s subscription e-book service, Kindle Unlimited, Publisher’s Weekly assesses the reactions of the press, publishers, and other subscription services [7], such as Oyster and Scribd (featured in the January/February issue [8] of Poets & Writers Magazine).
Meanwhile, Oyster’s full catalogue of e-books—formerly accessible only through an app—is now available on the web and mobile browsers [9]. The list includes several backlist titles from Simon & Schuster, who partnered with the e-book subscription service in May [10]. (GalleyCat, Forbes)
In reply to an article by Aimee Phan [11] published in Talking Writing this past February, seven writers and scholars respond to and expand upon the novelist’s argument that mainstream reviewers largely ignore books by writers of color [12]. (International Examiner)
Author Lara Pawson highlights five canonical texts [13]—including José Eduardo Agualusa’s novel Creole and Ondjaki’s novella Good Morning Comrades—to initiate readers with the culture, politics, and history of Angola. (I. B. Tauris)