Alice Quinn is stepping down to work on a further Elizabeth Bishop volume, and Muldoon is taking the post. Here’s the Times story.

Mr. Muldoon quickly emerged as the leading candidate after Ms. Quinn announced her intentions.
“It’s not just a matter of picking the best poet you can think of,” said David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker. “It’s also somebody who would know how to be in touch with an enormous range of poets, and that narrows it down a little bit more. And also somebody who’s not in Alaska.”
…
Mr. Muldoon said he had no particular agenda for the job, which is a part-time post. “One would want to be absolutely open to the poem that one simply did not expect to have made its way into the world and somehow suddenly falls on one’s desk,” he said.

As Brian Sholis adds, it’s really Muldoon’s week:

Not only will Paul Muldoon succeed Alice Quinn as poetry editor at The New Yorker, but yesterday it was announced that Muldoon has hired novelist Jeffrey Eugenides at the Center for Creative and Performing Arts at Princeton University, where he serves as chair. Muldoon was quoted as saying, “‘We’re thrilled to have Jeffrey Eugenides join our permanent faculty. He’s quite simply the finest writer of his generation and we look forward to allowing Princeton students to be the beneficiaries of his extraordinary talent as a teacher.”

The image I cherish of Muldoon is that of him reading and playing music at Williamsburg’s old Pete’s Big Salmon series a couple of years ago, whooping it up with writers of several generations; as Shanna Compton wrote at the time, “Paul Muldoon was mellifiluous and changed into the tee shirt Maureen made him that said ‘i am famous in japan’ to play with his band and that’s probably true.” He’s like the best-loved camp counselor you ever knew who can also write a bang-up poem.

In other masthead news, managing editor Jacob Lewis is leaving the magazine to join Portfolio.