Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Names and faces
■ Olivia Harrison, widow of Beatle George Harrison and a philanthropist and film producer, has a few words of her own to share. She has written 20 original poems about her late husband for the book “Came the Lightening,” which comes out June 21. It will include photographs and images of mementos and an introduction by Martin Scorsese, who directed a 2011 documentary about George Harrison. “Olivia evokes the most fleeting gestures and instants, plucked from the flow of time and memory and felt through her choice of words and the overall rhythm,” Scorsese writes. “She might have done an oral history or a memoir. Instead, she composed a work of poetic autobiography.” Olivia Arias met George Harrison in the mid-1970s while working in the marketing department of A& M Records, which distributed Harrison’s Dark Horse label. They married in 1978, a month after the birth of their son, Dhani. George Harrison died of cancer at age 58 in 2001.
■ President Joe Biden plans to attend the White House Correspondents’ Association’s annual dinner, the first time a sitting president will be at the event since Barack Obama in 2016. The organization said in a tweet that it was pleased to host the president and f irst lady Ji l l Biden at the April 30 dinner, which will honor the First Amendment. Donald Trump opted to skip the event when he was president, and it was canceled the past two years because of the coronavirus pandemic. Trevor Noah, host of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” will be the entertainer. In 2018, Michelle Wolf’s biting, after-dinner comedy routine grabbed headlines even in Trump’s absence. Capacity for the event is about 2,600, and it’s fully booked. After the Gridiron Club dinner in Washington earlier this month, some of those who attended tested positive for covid-19 amid a surge of cases around the capital. But Ashish Jha, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, has suggested the correspondents’ dinner should move forward, saying “we are at the point in this pandemic” where “I think we can gather safely.”