To kick off this year's San Francisco International Poetry Festival, Mayor Ed Lee announced yesterday that the city has a new poet laureate: Alejandro Murguía. Murguía, professor of Latino/Latina Studies at San Francisco State University, is the city's sixth poet laureate.

Take a look at SearchWorks for titles by Alejandro Murguía available here in Green Library.

The San Francisco Public Library has on its site a chronology of the city's poets laureate.

The 12 titles on the longlist for the 2012 Man Booker Prize for Fiction—"the world's most important literary award," according to its website—have just been announced.

From the Man Booker Prize website:

What is eligible for the prize?

Any full-length novel, written by a citizen of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland and published in the United Kingdom for the first time in the year of the prize. The novel must be an original work in English (not a translation) and must not be self-published.

The shortlist of six titles will be announced on Tuesday, 11 September; the winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2012 will be announced on Tuesday, 16 October 2012.

The Man Booker Prize site includes an interactive timeline of the history of the prize.

Take a look at SearchWorks to see titles from the longlist available here in Green Library.

Next Tuesday noted Russian historian and Hoover Institution fellow Robert Service will discuss his latest book: Spies and Commissars: Bolshevik Russia and the West. The talk will be held in Stauffer Auditorium in the Herbert Hoover Memorial Building at 4:00 PM. This event is open to all.

The Stanford University Libraries will host an exhibition marking the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Hand Bookbinders of California. The exhibition will open Thursday, July 19, 2012, in the Peterson Gallery and Munger Rotunda, Green Library, Stanford University, and continue through Wednesday, September 5.

Formed in March 1972, the Hand Bookbinders of California was from its inception devoted to promoting and supporting the craft of traditional Western hand bookbinding. The founding group included some of the Bay Area’s most influential collectors, among them Duncan Olmstead and Gale Herrick, and many binders and teachers of binding, such as Stella Patri and Leah Wollenberg. Membership is open to binders of all skill levels anywhere in the world as well as anyone interested in its mission. Members are encouraged to enter their work in the annual, non-juried exhibition.

In addition to contemporary members’ bindings, this year’s exhibition at Stanford includes fine design bindings selected from the Libraries’ Special Collections. Bindings by Paul Bonet and Pierre Lucien Martin represent the strong French influence on the work of Bay Area teachers of binding, many of whom studied in France. Also on display is work by some of the organization’s early members and teachers, including Belle McMurtry Young, Peter Fahey, Florence Walter, Betty Lou Chaika, Donald Glaister, Joanne Sonnichsen, Barbara Fallon Hiller, Anne Kahle, and Eleanore Ramsey.