In a recent sketch on his show, television host Conan O’Brien confessed: “TBS, my new bosses, they’re worried that authors won’t be entertaining enough to our young audience, most of whom have never seen a book.”

In response, O’Brien created a new feature that will bring literature to a generation bored with books: Famous Authors on Ziplines. We’ve embedded the video above–what do you think?

The funny literary stunt featured readings by Joyce Carol Oates, Maya Angelou, Thomas Wolfe.

Poet Maya Angelou is not a fan of the new Martin Luther King monument in Washington, DC (pictured, via). In a Washington Post article, the poet objected to the quote carved on the newly unveiled MLK monument.

The original King quote read: “If you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter.” But it has been shortened to read “I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness.”

Here’s Angelou’s quote, from the article: “The quote makes Dr. Martin Luther King look like an arrogant twit … He was anything but that. He was far too profound a man for that four-letter word to apply.”

Before they were mainstays on countless bestseller lists, Maya Angelou, Terry McMillan and Alice Walker were all once featured in Essence. And, says editor-in-chief Constance C.R. White, the magazine is always looking to give the next big talent a shot at a byline as well.

“The first thing you think about is what are Black women thinking about. What’s important to Black women?” White explains in our latest Media Beat interview. “And that is really the crux of what we do at Essence and, therefore if you’re pitching us, that’s what you should be focused on too as a writer.”

You can also view this video on YouTube.

Part 2: Tuesday, we discuss the real deal behind that fashion director controversy.

Part 3: Wednesday, White explains how she’s growing Essence.com in the face of steep competition from entertainment blogs.

Abrams will release The Oprah Winfrey Show: Reflections on an American Legacy on November 15th. According to Publishers Weekly, an initial printing of 500,000 copies has been ordered.

Here’s more from the release: “The book chronicles the full 25 years of ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show’ with unforgettable highlights and images, as well as essays about its indelible impact and most important themes by well-known individuals across a wide variety of areas and interests.”

Nonfiction writer Deborah Davis will write the narrative text. The book will feature a forward by poet Maya Angelou and essays by Pulitzer winner Toni Morrison and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel. All three of these authors were featured in Oprah’s book club.

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Renowned poet Maya Angelou has donated 300 boxes filled with her personal papers to the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Angelou had this quote in the press release: “The Schomburg is a repository of the victories and the losses of the African American experience … I am grateful that it exists so that all the children, Black and White, Asian, Spanish-Speaking, Native American, and Aleutian can know there is a place where they can go and find the truth of the peoples’ history.”

The donation contains the notes for her autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and some of her most famous poems. One notable inclusion are the notes for the poem written at the request of former President Bill Clinton, On the Pulse of Morning. The video embedded above shows her reading it at Clinton’s 1993 inauguration. Several unpublished manuscripts and poems have also been included in the lot.

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As rumors swirled last week that Oprah Winfrey may start a book club on her new cable network, Kitty Kelley (pictured) revealed some behind-the-scenes drama at the book club in her unauthorized biography of Winfrey.

Kelley’s 544-page biography comes out tomorrow. GalleyCat picked out a few choice passages about the book club so you can know what to expect. For instance, the book spends pages analyzing James Frey‘s appearance on Winfrey’s show.

Frey had been a book club pick, but once he was exposed for fabricating portions of his memoir, Winfrey roasted him on national television. According to the biography, Winfrey apologized to the author in the green room after her televised rebuke. Here’s a quote: “The New York Times and The Washington Post wouldn’t let it go. We had to stop it. I’m so sorry, but they were investigating us. And we just couldn’t have that,” Winfrey reportedly told Frey.

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February 2009 brought a fake Twitter feed and a major horror author’s endorsement of a digital reader.

Early that month, a Citi Investment Research analyst made headlines by estimating that Amazon.com (AMZN) had sold 500,000 Kindles. Within days, we interviewed novelist Stephen King at the launch of Kindle 2.

The comic book world celebrated at a sold-out NYC Comic-Con, and GalleyCat scored interviews with publishing innovators about their work in comics, videogames, and graphic novels. In addition, an early Twitter book deal was signed and a fake Maya Angelou Twitter feed was exposed.

February also marked one of publishing’s darkest moments, as HarperCollins shuttered the Collins division. Dubbed the “YouTube for print,” Scribd counted 50 million readers. That same month, Publishers Weekly also launched a page collecting contact information from laid-off publishing employees.

Welcome to GalleyCat’s annual year-end roundup of publishing headlines. It’s a chance to celebrate our good news and reflect on our bad news after a long, challenging year for the industry. Visit our Year in Review link to read all about what happened to publishing in 2009. Include your favorite headlines in the comments section…

Over the weekend, the gossip site TMZ erroneously reported that Maya Angelou had been sent to the hospital, spawning an avalanche of Twitter posts.

Since then, TMZ has retracted the report, noting that the poet is “alive and well in St. Louis.” The site blames event organizers for telling a photographer that the poet had been hospitalized. This is Angelou’s second bad experience with Twitter this year–in February she exposed a fake Angelou Twitter page with thousands of followers.

A Reuters‘ report gleefully listed all the celebrity missteps created by online journalists: “TMZ got the worldwide scoop on the death of Michael Jackson in June, but wrongly reported the following month that former UFC superstar Kimo Leopoldo had died. Last month, gossip columnist Perez Hilton claimed that former Charlie’s Angels star Jaclyn Smith had tried to commit suicide. It appeared to be a case of mistaken identity. Hilton also suggested in 2007 that Fidel Castro had died.”

At today’s memorial service for Michael Jackson at Staples Center in Los Angeles, actress and musician Queen Latifah read “We Had Him,” a poem by Maya Angelou about the pop icon. Here’s one YouTube link to the poem.

The poem initiated a cascade of Twitter posts, as the author of the classic book, “I Know why the Caged Bird Sings,” shared her admiration for Jackson. Until a full clip of the poem is posted online, GalleyCat has collected a few Twitter-ed excerpts from the tribute poem. “He was ours and we are his,” wrote Angelou.

“We were enchanted with his passion because he held nothing. He gave us all he had been given,” she continued. “We do know we had him and we are the world,” the poem concluded.

After reading Dinitia Smith‘s story about Robert Loomis, who’s just turned 80 and has spent a record 50 years as an editor at Random House, I feel very red-faced. Because Korda, Mayhew, Mehta and Gottlieb are names that trip easily off my publishing-wonk tongue, but Loomis? Alas, my industry vocabulary hadn’t included him – until now. But then, he’s an editor of the classic mold, content to stay in the background and let the spotlight shine upon authors such as William Styron, Calvin Trillin, Edmund Morris, Maya Angelou, Shelby Foote, Jonathan Harr and Pete Dexter.

“About 25 years ago, I began to think, ‘I’m a stick in the mud,’” Loomis told an audience of close to a hundred – including many of the authors he helped launch to stardom – in the trustees room of the New York Public Library last week, at a tribute celebrating his 50 years at Random House. “‘Why wasn’t I moving on?’” Why wasn’t he like so many other editors jumping from house to house in search of bigger, better opportunities? Because, simply put, he loved his authors too much, and if one needed years to write a book, he’d wait patiently for the finished product. But as for the retirement question, Loomis is quick to shrug it aside. “It makes people nervous.” He will always be attached to Random House, he said.