The Oregon nonprofit Literary Arts recently announced the winners of the 2026 Oregon Book Awards, celebrating the thriving literary culture of the state. Winners included Jennifer Perrine, who received the Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry for Beautiful Outlaw (Kelsey Street Press); Ling Ling Huang, who received the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction for Immaculate Conception (Dutton); and Judith Barrington, who received the Sarah Winnemucca Award for Creative Nonfiction for Virginia’s Apple: Collected Memoirs (Oregon State University Press). The Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award was given to Willamette Writers, the largest writers organization in the Pacific Northwest, in recognition of “outstanding, long-term support of Oregon’s literary community.”

The “new adult” fiction category seems here to stay, observes Daniel Yadin in Publishers Weekly. Fueled by BookTok and a generation of readers raised in the age of “YA juggernaut series,” the “new adult” category has been embraced by Big Five publishers in the last two years. St. Martin’s launched its new adult imprint Saturday Books in 2024; imprints Berkley XO, Requited, and Scarlett Press followed as projects of Penguin Young Readers; Little, Brown; and Simon & Schuster.  “Late teens to twenties is a unique period in someone’s life, and that hasn’t been fully recognized as its own category,” Lisa Yoskowitz, editorial lead of Requited, told PW. “This does feel like the moment to be meeting it.”

On the occasion of Earth Day, the Academy of American Poets has announced the winners of the 2026 Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize, an annual award recognizing “exceptional poems that help readers recognize the vulnerable state of our environment.” This year’s first-place poem is “In the not-not-woods” by Malia Maxwell; poets W. J. Herbert, Ronald Carson, and Deahna Fumerol were also honored. All four poets will have their poems appear in the Academy’s Poem-a-Day series, which reaches 330,000 readers and podcast listeners daily. (Learn more about the Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize in “Celebrating the Earth That Lifts Us Up: Contests Honoring Environmental Writing” by Emma Hine, featured in the May/June 2026 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.)

Rightsholders for more than 91 percent of the works named in the Anthropic lawsuit have filed claims in the class action settlement for the company’s pirating of books to train their LLM, according to Publishers Lunch. “Attorneys received 119,876 claims by the March 30 deadline, according to the court filing. Those account for 440,490 of the 482,460 works on the works list.”

Former librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, who was fired by President Donald Trump last year, was among three honorees recognized by the Authors Guild at the organization’s annual fundraising gala on Monday night, the Associated Press reports. “In many places today, librarians are under attack for believing in the power of the written word and in the principle that free people should be able to read freedom. Yet librarians remain steady and hopeful,” said Hayden, who received the Champion of Writers Award. The other honorees were authors Percival Everett, who received the Baldacci Award for Literary Activism, and Amy Tan, recipient of the Preston Award for Distinguished Service to the Literary Community.

Eight handwritten letters from John Keats to Fanny Brawne were returned to the family of John Hay “Jock” Whitney, the former U.S. ambassador to the UK, after being stolen from Whitney’s home in the 1980s, the Guardian reports. “Brawne was Keats’s neighbor in Hampstead, with whom he became infatuated and elevated to muse and goddess.” The thirty-seven letters, valued at approximately $2 million, are dated between 1819 and 1820.

The American Library Association (ALA) released its annual list of the most commonly challenged books at libraries across the United States, NPR reports. “The ALA says that it documented 4,235 unique titles being challenged in 2025—the second-highest year on record for library challenges. (The highest ever was in 2023, with 4,240 challenges documented—only five more than in this most recent year.)” The eleven most frequently targeted books are Sold by Patricia McCormick, The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe, Empire of Storms by Sarah J. Maas, Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo, Tricks by Ellen Hopkins, A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas, A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, Identical by Ellen Hopkins, Looking for Alaska by John Green, and Storm and Fury by Jennifer L. Armentrout.

Bookshop.org’s sales grew by 55 percent last year, reports Publishers Weekly. Six years since its inception, the online bookseller, which offers a revenue stream to independent bookstores and gives readers an alternative to Amazon in the process, continues to grow due to increased sales for romance books, new e-book sales, and a Spotify partnership, started in February of this year, that allows users to buy print books in the app through Bookshop. “If I told you in 2019 that there was going to be a massive resurgence of indie bookstores after twenty years of decline, nobody would have believed me,” says Andy Hunter, Bookshop’s CEO.

Books clubs throughout Los Angeles have evolved into unconventional and diverse community-focused events, reports Malia Mendez of the Los Angeles Times. “Driven by Gen Z and millennial organizers eager to shed the isolation of the pandemic era, events ranging from book crawls to silent reading parties are successfully turning time spent with literature into happening social occasions.” The duo behind the Preoccupied literary platform even started a walking book club, which includes a forty-minute stroll with a featured author followed by shopping at a local bookstore.  

The winners of the 38th annual Publishing Triangle Awards were recently announced. The following ten titles were selected “as the very best in LGBTQ+ literature published in 2025.” Drought by Scott Alexander Hess (Rebel Satori Press) won the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ+ Fiction; Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu (Little, Brown) won the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction; Beyond the Lesbian Vampire: Reclaiming the Violent Lesbian in Contemporary Queer Horror by Sam Tabet (University of Wales Press) won the Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction; Baldwin: A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) won the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction; The Boy Kingdom / El reino de los varones by Achy Obejas (Beacon Press) won the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry; I Do Know Some Things by Richard Siken (Copper Canyon Press) won the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry; Local Woman by Jzl Jmz (Nightboat Books) won the Leslie Feinberg Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature; Mirage City by Lev AC Rosen (Minotaur Books) won the Joseph Hansen Award for LGBTQ+ Crime Writing; We Can Never Leave by H. E. Edgmon (Wednesday Books) won the Jacqueline Woodson Award for LGBTQ+ Young Adult and Children’s Literature; and What Is Queer Food?: How We Served a Revolution by John Birdsall (Norton) won the Amber Hollibaugh Award for LGBTQ+ Social Justice Writing. Each winner will receive $1,000. 

Publishers Weekly has announced its 2026 Bookstore of the Year: Watchung Booksellers in Montclair, New Jersey. The beloved bookstore has been in business since 1991 and is praised for the community it engenders; its unique spirit inspired former Watchung staffer Lily Braun-Arnold to pen her YA novel The Last Bookstore on Earth informed by the magic of her “home away from home.” In her letter nominating the store for the award, journalist Candy J. Cooper described it as “a cozy reading space for toddlers, a launchpad for local and regional authors, a recommender of great reads, a partner and promoter of the local literary festival, a beacon of sanity during the pandemic shutdown. The presence of Watchung Booksellers in the neighborhood persuaded me to move to Montclair thirty years ago and makes it difficult to imagine ever leaving now. It has meant more in my life, for my overall sense of happiness and well-being, than any other local business.”

Publishers Lunch reports on a new “interactive storytelling experience” from controversial chatbot company Character.ai that tells its users: “Don’t read books. Play them.” The offering, simply called “Books,” takes plotlines from canonical novels and other public domain works and allows its users to play out the novels’ plotlines or deviate from them as they choose; one demo models “a user changing the world of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz so that ‘Toto the dog was the one pulling the strings all along.”’ Character.ai, which promises users the experience of “[a]ll the classics. Even the ones you never finished,” has been the subject of considerable scrutiny: “It has come under fire for the platform’s chatbots of teenagers who were murdered and criminals including school shooters and Jeffrey Epstein. Character.ai is also engaged in lawsuits after teen users died by suicide after communicating with bots on the platform.”

Philadelphia author Emma Copley Eisenberg is bringing a message of fat-positivity to her community using $3,000 from an Anthropic settlement and a billboard, reports the Philadelphia Inquirer. Earlier this week, the billboard was unveiled at Front Street and Fairmount Avenue, depicting a large, naked female body and the message “Your gut is a terrible thing to lose.” The URL fatswim.com in the bottom corner directs audiences to a website that shares its name with Eisenberg’s forthcoming short story collection centering fat, queer Philadelphians. “‘We just so rarely see images of fat people in public,’ said Eisenberg, whose fiction and nonfiction pieces aggressively challenge the notion that big people are unhappy in their skin and view their girth as temporary.” (Eisenberg prefers the language “fat” to words like “curvy,” which she sees as euphemisms that perpetuate the idea that “big people are unhappy in their skin.”) The billboard was financed with the $3,000 she received from a class-action lawsuit against Anthropic, which trained its AI model on another one of her books. “Essentially, algorithms are controlled by multinational corporations that are profiting off our data,” Eisenberg said to the Inquirer. “I want to interrupt that and, as a human, put important ideas in front of other humans who might not otherwise find them.”

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has announced its 2026 fellows across poetry, fiction, general nonfiction, biography, literary criticism, translation, and more. This 101st cohort of fellows represents 223 artists, scientists, and scholars, including writers Raymond Antrobus, Amitav Ghosh, Edgar Kunz, Rickey Laurentiis, Megha Majumdar, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, and Namwali Serpell. 

Noemi Press will be the new home for the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, as announced via Instagram yesterday. The biannual award, named after the late Chicano poet, was established in 2004 by Letras Latinas to support the publication of debut poetry collections by Latinx poets residing in the United States. Montoya’s brother, the author and artist Maceo Montoya, stated, “Andrés lived and breathed poetry. He believed in its power to change the world. Noemi Press is the perfect home for the prize because it embodies this ethos and is deeply committed to every book it publishes.” 

The 2026 Whiting Award winners were announced during a ceremony last night. The ten recipients are poets Hajar Hussaini, Brittany Rogers, and Alison C. Rollins; fiction writers Elaine Castillo, Hilary Leichter, and Lara Mimosa Montes; nonfiction writers Negar Azimi, Karen Hao, and Carvell Wallace; and dramatist and filmmaker Celine Song. All writers will receive a $50,000 cash prize. The annual awards are given “to identify exceptional new writers who are just making their mark in the literary culture.”

In an opinion piece for the New York Times, Colson Whitehead offers his unvarnished thoughts on the place of AI in art: “Studies show that overreliance on these digital tools causes cognitive decline, but if current events are any indication, nobody’s making much of a contribution anyway. Go ahead and use AI however you like. Except art. If you use it for your art, you’re a freakin’ hack.”

A new partnership with Bookshop.org will allow Spotify users to order books through the streaming service’s app, reports Book Riot. The partnership extends Spotify’s efforts to cater to book fans; since launching its audiobook services in 2022, Spotify has nearly quintupled the number of titles available on the platform, expanding from 150,000 to 700,000. The collaboration with Bookshop.org dovetails with its Page Match feature, a tool launched in February that allows readers to switch between a physical book and an audiobook without losing their place. 

Citing concerns about “job security, wages, and a need for greater transparency from company leadership,” employees at Catapult Book Group have unionized, reports Publishers Weekly.  Catapult unionizes as part of UAW Local 2011, which also represents workers at HarperCollins, Abrams, and the New Press. “I’m eager to form a union at Catapult to create a healthier workplace so that I, my colleagues, and future employees can sustain a meaningful career in publishing,” said Skye Tarshis in a comment to Publishers Weekly. “With the current job market, it’s paramount that people have a say in their working conditions through a fair contract. I hope to set an example in the industry, so we can all protect our jobs and continue to pursue the literary work we’re passionate about.” Senior production editor Laura Berry echoed the sentiment: “It’s not sustainable to depend on good intentions when it comes to our livelihood, and a union can protect the conditions of our employment during a time of political hostility against books.”

PEN America has joined with one hundred organizations including the American Library Association, the American Booksellers Association, and the Children’s Book Council, to bring a letter to Congress urging the rejection of House Resolution 7661 (H.R. 7661), a bill that would “in effect mandate book censorship in the nation’s public schools.” The bill would invoke the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 to restrict funding to programming supporting books deemed to contain “sexually-oriented material” and material related to trans identity.  “H.R. 7661 threatens to suppress access to important books for students—a clear attempt to further erode the freedom to read in this country. That Congress would task itself with deciding what books belong in schools is absurd and yet another example of government overreach tormenting public schools and libraries,” said Kasey Meehan, the director of PEN America’s Freedom to Read initiative. “The bill’s focus on a limited number of ‘classic works’ and explicit anti-trans language also signals the continued desire to censor identities and stories of people of color and LGBTQ+ people and books that reflect the lived experiences of young people today.”