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:
Leslie Moonves, the CEO of CBS, which owns Simon & Schuster, reports that the publisher is currently in negotiations with Amazon. “Obviously Amazon has a very definitive point of view on what should be done in the publishing business,” says Moonves, who notes that while CBS works with Amazon in a variety of capacities, the companies are also competitors. (Shelf Awareness)
Actress Joely Richardson will play Emily Dickinson—as well as fourteen other characters—in an upcoming Broadway revival of the play The Belle of Amherst, a one-woman show exploring the life of the poet in mid-nineteenth-century Massachusetts. (Hollywood Reporter)
Actress and writer Lena Dunham has scheduled a book tour to promote her forthcoming essay collection, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned,” and is seeking local performers to serve as opening acts. (GalleyCat)
In Chicago, Linda Bubon and Ann Christophersen, the founders of the city’s iconic feminist and LGBT bookstore Women & Children First, have sold the store to current employees Lynn Mooney and Sarah Hollenbeck. The new owners plan to renovate the store, adding a new space to be used for lectures, group meetings, and storytelling events. (Windy City Times)
In a shopping center in Milton Keynes, England, a robot is helping to create a temporary art installation by writing lines from a poem by Jackie Kay using colored sand. Kay explored the topic of her adoption and of the search for her birth mother, who is now suffering from dementia, in a collection of poems called The Adoption Papers, from which the lines included in the project are taken. (Guardian)
Beijing-based essayist and playwright Li Xuewen recently reported that he was fired from his job as a book editor after attending an event in May marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the student-led protests in Tiananmen Square. (New York Times)
Anjali Singh, editorial director of Other Press, speaks with Guernica about acquiring Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoir Persepolis, and about race and class in publishing.
Israel Centeno, a Venezuelan author whose novel El Complot ("The Conspiracy") led to his persecution by the Venezuelan government, talks to the Pittsburgh City Paper about his exile in Pennsylvania and his process of translating El Complot into an English-language edition, published this past May.
