PEN America has shared the fifty finalists for its 2026 Literary Awards, “showcasing excellence from literary superstars and new voices alike and spanning genres including fiction, poetry, drama, essays, biography, translation, nonfiction, and more.” Additionally, Edwidge Danticat and Julia Cho have been named career achievement honorees for the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature and the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award, respectively. The award ceremony will be held on March 31.

The American Booksellers Association has announced that they are relaunching their Indies Choice Book Awards via the press release distribution platform EIN Presswire. For these awards, titles “are nominated and selected by booksellers from over 3,000 independent bookstores nationwide. They celebrate the best and brightest titles by authors and illustrators in the indie channel, showcasing the remarkable range of talent indie booksellers champion and share with readers every day.” Winners will receive $2,000 each in the categories of Adult Fiction, Adult Nonfiction, Picture Book, Middle Grade, Young Adult, Debut Adult, and Debut Children’s. The shortlist will be announced on March 11 and the winners will be revealed on April 8. 

One year after the Eaton fire in Altadena, California, the Los Angeles Times speaks with five local writers on the archives and creative spaces they lost and how they’re reclaiming their literary practices. Storyteller Sakae Manning recently started writing again about how she views life differently after losing her home, while poet and educator Bonnie S. Kaplan turned to creating stand-up routines. Novelist Désirée Zamorano’s biggest takeaway from the fire: “[P]eople are better than you think they are. Really and truly. Of my writer’s group in Altadena, four of the five, their homes are gone…and the support everyone received was just beautiful…” 

“A set of unredacted and less-redacted documents from the Anthropic case have been released, revealing more details on the tech company’s secret plan to copy every book in existence,” Publishers Lunch reports. The secret plan, Project Panama, aimed to acquire an undisclosed number books, cut off the spines, and scan them, allowing them to be used to “train AI to write well.” The documents describe intentions to target used bookstores, wholesalers, the Strand, New York Public Library, and underfunded libraries for the acquisition of these books at low rates. “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world,” Anthropic said in the filings, as reported by the Washington Post. “We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”

A Minnesota bookseller has gone viral for standing up to ICE agents in the aftermath of Alex Pretti’s murder, Publishers Weekly reports. The viral video and photographs show Greg Ketter, owner of DreamHaven Books and Comics, walking through clouds of tear gas and cursing at dozens of federal agents gathered half a block from the site of Pretti’s murder, just hours after his death. “Life for Ketter has not been the same since. The store landline has been ringing off the hook...and DreamHaven’s website has received so many hits that it went down for several days.”

After six years operating in partnership with Tin House, the acclaimed literary podcast Between the Covers is moving to Milkweed Editions, podcast creator and host David Naimon announced on social media. Known for “its generous and in-depth conversations with today’s most vital thinkers,” Between the Covers features Naimon’s interviews with contemporary luminaries of poetry and prose. 

Days after Alex Pretti was killed by ICE agents in Minneapolis, a group of publishing professionals, including Mabel Hsu and Zoey Cole, are organizing a two-day online auction to raise money for Minnesotans and immigrants elsewhere, Publishers Weekly reports. The group, Publishing for Minnesota, is holding the auction (among the offerings are “signed books, author headshots, original art, critiques for novels and picture books, marketing feedback, portfolio reviews, and ‘art jam sessions’”) on January 29 and January 30. The proceeds “will support organizations providing legal aid, emergency assistance, food, and community resources to Minnesotans in urgent need due to ICE’s activities.”

The Academy of American Poets has announced the election of poets Gabrielle Calvocoressi and Cornelius Eady as chancellors. Established in 1946, the board of chancellors is “a group of fifteen distinguished poets who advise the Academy of American Poets on artistic matters, judge its largest legacy prizes, and serve as ambassadors of poetry.”

The National Book Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation recently announced the selected titles for the fifth annual Science + Literature program, which identifies three books annually that deepen readers’ understanding of science and technology across fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Authors receive $10,000 and will be celebrated at a public ceremony in New York City in March. This year’s selected titles are Ancient Light (University of Arizona Press) by Kimberly Blaeser, Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature (Spiegel & Grau) by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, and Bog Queen (Bloomsbury Publishing) by Anna North.

Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs has announced Laura Tohe as the new poet laureate for the state, according to Journalaz.com. Appointed on January 14, distinguished poet, librettist, and prose writer Tohe will serve as the second poet laureate of Arizona, following Alberto Álvaro Ríos. She was born in Fort Defiance, Arizona, and grew up speaking both English and Diné Bizaad (the Navajo language), having previously served as poet laureate of the Navajo Nation from 2015 to 2019. In response to this honor, Tohe wrote: “Poetry is alive; it celebrates our human experience with language, voice, and reflection. I especially look forward to sharing and supporting poetry in Arizona’s rural communities. This is an exciting opportunity.”

Vogue recently launched a book club, starting this month with the classic 1847 novel Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. Participants can share their thoughts via virtual conversations which will culminate in a live event in the coming weeks. The fashion magazine plans to cover four books throughout the year and even offers a daily reading schedule for those wanting to wrap up before the February event. 

Libro.fm, an “online platform that partners with independent bookstores to sell audiobooks,” has now launched an annual subscription plan to retain customers and compete with Amazon’s Audible, Publishers Weekly reports. Having built up the growth momentum and scale to add this annual Plus membership alongside their existing monthly subscription, the Seattle-based company can now pay their booksellers upfront. Libro.fm’s cofounder and CEO, Mark Pearson, “credits booksellers with helping create curated playlists to promote books, making customers aware of the service, and handselling subscriptions while customers are in store,” leading them to their current success. 

“Hundreds of shops, restaurants, and cultural institutions” across Minneapolis have closed their doors today as part of a general strike to protest the federal deportation program targeting the city, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports. Numerous local bookstores and publishers have announced their participation in the economic freeze, known as the Day of Truth and Freedom, including Birchbark Books, Graywolf Press, and Milkweed Editions, as reported by Literary Hub and shared on social media channels this past week. “Milkweed Editions could not exist without its beautiful and diverse community of authors and readers in Minnesota—our home, where so many are being threatened with cruelty and removal,” said Milkweed staff in a January 20 statement on Facebook about the strike.

Former Bantam Books editor Toni Burbank has died, Publishers Lunch reports. After beginning her career at Columbia University Press, Burbank joined the staff of Bantam where she would work for over forty years, rising to the position of vice president and executive editor. “Toni was a legend who championed books that inspired readers to better understand themselves and the world around them,” said the Bantam staff in a statement on the news of her passing.

Percival Everett was the best-selling Black author in 2025, Publishers Weekly reports. His Pulitzer Prize-winning novel James, a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, tops the new list compiled by the African American Literature Book Club based on sales figures from Circana BookScan. Also leading the list are works by Kamala Harris, Octavia Bulter, Kimberly D. Moore, and Rachel Renee Russell.

The Bookseller has covered the death of a worker at the Hachette U.K. distribution warehouse in Oxfordshire this week. Though the circumstances of the death are still unknown, the staff member was much-loved by his colleagues, according to a representative for the publisher. A Thames Valley Police spokesperson added, “Sadly, a twenty-three-year-old man has died. His next of kin have been informed and offered support by officers. A twenty-one-year-old man from Wallingford was arrested on suspicion of gross negligence manslaughter and has since been bailed.”

To counteract the book bans that have been taking place in libraries and schools across the nation, the grassroots organization We Need Diverse Books (WNDB) has announced their Unbanned Book Network, reports the Associated Press. This network “will donate books by authors who have been banned and select Author Ambassadors for school districts facing bans.” WNDB is aiming to start with twenty schools in states where book banning is more widespread, including Texas and Florida. WNDB’s CEO, Dhonielle Clayton, remarks, “We’re not only facing an ongoing literacy crisis in the U.S., we’re also battling increased rates of censorship, which is infringing on our students’ right to read,” adding that the Unbanned Book Network will demonstrate “the power of diverse literature to transform young lives and our communities.” 

California College of the Arts (CCA) will be closing their doors after the 2026-27 school year, reports KQED. In place of “northern California’s last nonprofit art school, which has served the region for 119 years” will be a new Vanderbilt University campus. The reason for CCA’s closing is related to financial hardship; in 2024 the school announced having a $20 million deficit and followed up with layoffs at that time, however running the school without a large endowment, and relying heavily on tuition, wasn’t sustainable in the long term. This signifies a major hit to the arts community in the Bay Area. 

Celebrated science fiction and fantasy publisher Tor will venture into commercial fiction with a new imprint, Publishers Weekly reports. Set to launch in January 2027, Wildthorn Books will publish fifteen to twenty titles each year in genres including commercial and upmarket women’s fiction, suspense, paranormal mystery, magical realism, speculative nonfiction, and historical fantasy. Devi Pillai and Monique Patterson will lead the imprint. “‘Readers have changed—and so has the market,’ said Pillai in a statement, noting that as commercial fiction continues to blend with genre, it became apparent that Tor ‘was the perfect house to create Wildthorn.’”

The PEN/Faulkner Foundation has announced the longlist for the 2026 PEN/Faulkner Award for Debut Novel. From this longlist, three finalists will be announced in February, and the winning book will be announced in March. This year’s longlisted titles are Trip by Amie Barrodale (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), We Pretty Pieces of Flesh by Colwill Brown (Henry Holt), The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (Crown), The Devil Three Times by Rickey Fayne (Little, Brown), Awake in the Floating City by Susanna Kwan (Pantheon), North Sun by Ethan Rutherford (Deep Vellum), Blob by Maggie Su (Harper), and Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar by Katie Yee (Summit Books). These titles were selected from from a pool of 146 novels published by debut novelists in 2025. Rachel Beanland, Dionne Irving, and Taymour Soomro judged.