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:
Today is Poem in Your Pocket Day, established by the Academy of American Poets in 1996 as part of National Poetry Month. The Boston Globe’s James Sullivan makes a case for carrying hip-hop lyrics in addition to the lines of Walt Whitman.
Meanwhile, for the remainder of the month a Brooklyn, New York–based project called NYCorrespondence has opened an international call for mail art using the postcard fuction of iPhone’s Poetics app.
Charles Simic remembers the Stony Brook World Poetry Conference of 1968, a meeting of more than a hundred poets with vastly different aesthetic sensibilities that culminated in a fistfight. (New York Review of Books)
Actress Jessica Chastain has been tapped to play a character based on Marilyn Monroe in an adaptation of the Joyce Carol Oates novel Blonde. Filming is scheduled to begin in August. (IndieWire)
Singer and songwriter Paul Simon joined a musical tribute to the late Seamus Heaney last night in Dublin, where earlier in the day a commemorative tapestry dedicated to the poet was unveiled in the city’s airport. (Irish Independent)
Novelist Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting, has joined a team of graphic novelists to create a work of dystopian fiction set in Scotland, which will be released at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in August. (Guardian)
Novelist and memoirist Elizabeth Gilbert has put her Frenchtown, New Jersey, house up for sale by owner. (New York Times)
Kenyan memoirist Binyavanga Wainaina discusses his life as an openly gay man in Africa at a time when anti-gay violence in the country is on the rise. (Here & Now)
David Sedaris has booked a June 11 stop at the newly opened Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor. (MLive)
