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:
Musician and pop culture icon Prince died Thursday at age fifty-seven. At Literary Hub [2] and the New Yorker [3], writers pay tribute to the influential performer. BuzzFeed has also compiled a list of the best writing about the artist [4] from the past few decades.
At the Paris Review, translator Damion Searls attempts to define poetry [5] through examining its challenging etymology.
“To risk something real as a writer is to risk making a fool of oneself.” Poet, translator, and novelist Idra Novey [6] writes at Catapult about the risk and reward involved in her choice to write between genres.
Ahead of the four-hundredth anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death tomorrow, twenty-five authors, including Margaret Atwood, Gillian Flynn, and Alexander McCall Smith, share their fondest Shakespeare memories [7]. (Signature)
Meanwhile, Transport for London and Shakespeare’s Globe have released a special edition of the London tube map [8] to mark the occasion [9], complete with characters from the Bard’s plays alongside locations of theaters where his works were performed. (Independent)
Not to be outdone, today also marks the four-hundredth anniversary of Don Quixote author Miguel de Cervantes [10]’s death. (NBC News)
Celebrate nature and the environment today with Bustle’s list of seven poems to read in honor of the forty-sixth annual Earth Day [11].