Some things that caught our attention this week.

• Poets Laureate: Aliki Barnstone and Beth Ann Fennelly have been named poet laureate of their respective states, Missouri and Mississippi.
  
  Aliki Barnstone has been appointed to the post of Poet Laureate of Missouri by the state’s governor, Jay Nixon. “I was really happy. I was giddy,” she said when she received word of the appointment. Barnstone is a professor of English at the University of Missouri in Columbia, and is the author of eight books of poetry, the first of which, The Real Tin Flower, was published when she was 12, and it featured a forward by Anne Sexton. Her newest, Dwelling, is forthcoming later this year. She has also published a book of translations of CP Cavafy’s poetry and a critical study of the work of Emily Dickinson.
  
  Beth Ann Fennelly directs the writing program at the University of Mississippi, and is the author of three volumes of poems, a novel cowritten with husband Tom Franklin, and two nonfiction works, the newest of which, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs, will be published next year. Fennelly applied for the post and was named by the executive director of the Mississippi Arts Commission, Malcolm White. She said, “I feel like Oxford specifically, and in Mississippi in general, reading still matters. It’s still a place where the stories we tell about each others lives influence our lives.”

• New Charlottesville, VA Mural Features Rita Dove’s Poetry
  
  A brand new mural on the campus of the University of Virginia features a line from Rita Dove’s poem, “Testimonial.” The mural was painted by artist David Guinn on the side of the Graduate Charlottesville hotel, overlooking the university. The colorful abstract painting features the line, “The world called, and I answered.” Dove said that she provided the artist with ten poems, but that she hoped “he would pick this one for many reasons. I think one of the main reasons is because I think it applies to all of us—at some point in our lives, we hit a point where a door opens, or you see it slammed in your face, or you need to make a door.”

• Which Version of Cloud Atlas You Read Depends Upon What Side of the Pond You’re On

  A professor at the University of London, Martin Paul Eve, discovered a great many discrepancies between the text in the US and the UK editions of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. He told The Guardian he found thirty pages of examples of variations between the two, and his paper on the subject can be read online at the Open Library of Humanities. “The UK version was submitted first and the US version some weeks or months later, so – if I was dead and couldn’t deny it – the inference would be that the American version is ‘more’ definitive,” said the novelist. “For me, in the case of Cloud Atlas, both work. Not that I have the faintest memory, after all these years, what the differences even are.”