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:

“This summer I’ve been absorbed by new novels, revisited an old classic, and reaffirmed my faith in our ability to move forward together when we seek the truth.” Barack Obama recommends five books he read this summer [2]. 

Ron Charles breaks down Obama’s reading list, calling it “a model of diverse voices and concerns [3], without a whiff of that synthetic intellectuality that frequently hovers around politicians’ alleged bedside reading.” (Washington Post)

Women swept all the major categories of the annual Hugo awards [4], given for works of science fiction. N. K. Jemisin won the best novel award [5] for the third year in a row for The Stone Sky. (Guardian)

“Poetry is permeative; it is currency; and it is, thankfully, too big to die.” Megan Garber on the growing readership and reach of poetry [6]. (Atlantic)

Last week New York State governor Andrew Cuomo named Colson Whitehead and Alicia Ostriker as New York’s state author and poet [7], respectively.

John Emmerling has found an unusual cure for writer’s block from the 1920s [8]: the Isolator Helmet, which completely covers a writer’s head and includes an oxygen tank to “sharply focus the mind.” (Publishers Weekly)

British publisher John Calder died [9] last week at the age of ninety-one. Calder published the work of Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, Eugène Ionesco, and Marguerite Duras, among others.

A new generation of young writers and novelists in Bhutan [10] is working to protect the nation’s culture as the country modernizes. (New York Times)

“Has a single good author ever owned a dog?” Karl Ove Knausgaard on “the trouble with dogs for a writer [11].” (New Yorker)