Names and faces

■ Oxygen Media, which specializes in true-crime entertainment programming for women, said a lawsuit filed by Beth Holloway seeking damages for a documentary about the disappearance of her teen-aged daughter in Aruba represents an “inaccurate depiction” of the show.

In a statement released late Tuesday, Oxygen said it has “deep compassion and sympathy” for relatives of Natalee Holloway but was disappointed by the filing of the lawsuit. In a federal suit filed in Birmingham, Holloway contends The Disappearance of Natalee Holloway was a fake documentary that subjected her to weeks of anguish when it aired last summer. In addition to Oxygen Media, an arm of NBCUniversal Cable Entertainment, Holloway also is suing the Los Angeles-based Brian Graden Media, which developed the show. The six-episode series included the discovery of what were supposedly remains that could be those of Natalee. But the lawsuit claims that producers knew that bone fragments featured in the production weren’t linked to Natalee before supposed testing produced inconclusive results. Oxygen Media said the show followed Dave Holloway, a Mississippi insurance agent who was Natalee’s father and the former husband of Beth Holloway, as he searched for answers about his daughter. Natalee Holloway was 18 when she disappeared after a night with friends at an Aruba nightclub. No remains were ever found, and the Dutch teen suspected in her death, Joran van der Sloot, is now imprisoned for the slaying of another young woman in Peru in 2010.

■ National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward has her next two novels planned. Ward will write an adult novel about an enslaved woman sent from the Carolinas to New Orleans. She will then work on her first novel for middle-graders, a “magical adventure” featuring a Southern black woman with “special powers.” “Even though I read voraciously as a child, I never saw myself in books,” Ward said in a statement released by her publisher, Scribner. “Without narratives to expand my ideas of who I could be, I accepted the stories others told me about myself, stories which diminished and belittled me and people like me. I want to write against that. I’ve wanted to write a middle grade/YA [young adult] book for years, a book that might reach the child I once was and expand that child’s sense of self.” Titles and publication dates for the two books have not yet been determined. A Mississippi native, Ward won the National Book Award last fall for her novel about a black family in her home state, Sing, Unburied, Sing. She also won the National Book Award in 2011 for Salvage the Bones, the story of a Mississippi community confronting Hurricane Katrina.

Ward

Holloway