Poetry magazine, one of the country’s oldest and most prominent literary publications, will for the first time have a Black editor.

Houston Newsmakers: Prairie View A&M’s Simmons Center for Race and Justice makes progress in research

Gwen Zepeda, Houston's 2013-2015 poet laureate, at the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Conference XV in February 2020. HOUSTON – The Mayor’s Office and the Office of Cultural Affairs is looking for the next poet laureate to celebrate Houston’s culture and diversity through literature. Serving as the city’s ambassador for literary arts, the goal for the Poet Laureate is to represent Houston by creating excitement about poetry through outreach, programs, teaching, and written work, the Office of Cultural Affairs said. Poet laureates will serve a two-year term and the current term will begin in April. The serving poet laureate will receive a total honorarium of $20,000 over the two-year term, the city said on the website.

HOUSTON – A Harvard Medical School professor and doctor of internal medicine published a poem as an ode to essential workers fighting the coronavirus pandemic and their families and it’s now circulating widely on social media. Wendy Stead, MD authored the poem “An Essential Worker’s List of Pandemic Chores for the Kids”, written about the children of essential workers who were left home to take care of the chores, from laundry to schoolwork. In the poem published on the JAMA Network, she emphasized that she “is an essential worker” and called it a comfort of being one “while the dead (bodies) piled up.”“It’s OK to lose the game. Sometimes a leader needs to stay calm so everyone else knows it will be OK,” the poem said. Many of the readers on JAMA Network took the time to comment on her poem, saying it captured the conflict between a mom with her love for her children and her career as a frontline worker.