A few things that caught our attention this week:

• Ross Gay and Danez Smith were awarded the Kingsley Tufts and Kate Tufts poetry awards, respectively, for their books Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude and [insert] boy.

• PEN announces its 2016 Literary Award winners, including the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction going to Toni Morrison. The honor is for a distinguished living American author of fiction.

• Carl Phillips has selected Airea D. Matthews as the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets winner. Her book, simulacra, will be published next spring.

• Matthew Zapruder has been named as the New York Times Magazine Poetry Columnist, succeeding Natasha Trethewey.

• UCLA has opened up its creative writing courses to non-English majors and hired Fred D’Aguiar, who had previously taught at Miami University and Virginia Tech, to head the area of study. D’Aguiar remarked, “Exposure to the art of writing—or rather, arts, there are many forms of writing—increases our ability to empathize. That act of feeling connected to the narrative fate of a character on a flat page, if you can empathize with that, it can wake up a dormant ability to empathize with others in the world around you, even when they look, behave or believe differently from you.”

• Peter Rabbit is getting his own 50p coin.