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February 7, 2025

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has released the updated guidelines for the 2026 application cycle for Grants for Arts Projects along with a Legal Requirements and Assurance of Compliance page, which states applicants must comply with all executive orders.

February 7, 2025

Barbara Kingsolver has donated royalties from her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Demon Copperhead (Harper, 2022) to create a home for women in recovery in Lee County, where the novel is set, the New York Times reports. The center, “Higher Ground Women’s Recovery Residence,” will house between eight and twelve women recovering from drug addiction and offer counseling and other forms of educational support. Kingsolver, who grew up in rural Kentucky and lives on a farm in Virginia, felt she had to engage with the opioid epidemic in the region in her writing. She said, “The first week that this book hit the stores and was so successful, I said...I’m going to be able to do something concrete with this book that will help the people who told me their stories.”

February 7, 2025

ArtNet has compiled a list of the ways the Trump Administration is impacting the arts. The list includes the updated guidelines for National Endowment for the Arts grants; tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China; the dissolution of an arts committee previously restored by President Biden; and renewed plans for a “National Garden of American Heroes.”

February 7, 2025

Dozens of literary organizations and publishers have released a collective statement condemning President Trump’s executive order that declares his administration will enact “language and policies that recognize women are biologically female, and men are biologically male,” Publishers Weekly reports. The statement, which is signed by the American Booksellers Association, the National Book Critics Circle, PEN America, the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, and many others, asserts: “The ripple effect of this order will undoubtedly affect public schools, public libraries, and the literature that is shelved in both. Among the many harms it causes, the order targeting transgender, intersex, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming Americans threatens unconstitutional censorship that could have a grave impact on literature for years to come.”

February 7, 2025

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), which receives about $200 million in federal funding each year, has announced it will change its 2026 guidelines, terminating a fund for underserved communities and prioritizing projects that honor the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the Washington Post reports. The announcement follows an executive order by President Donald Trump establishing a new task force that includes the president, vice president, various agency leaders, and the chair of the NEA. Applications will be open until July 10, and organizations that already submitted grant applications to the NEA for the 2026 cycle must submit again under the new guidelines.

February 6, 2025

Ukraine’s Chytomo Award recipients for 2024 have been announced and honored in Kyiv, Publishing Perspectives reports. Anton Martynov, the founder and former director of Laboratoria, was honored as the Book Publishing Market Trendsetter; BaraBooka received the Book Initiative That Promotes Reading award for “consistent efforts to cultivate a community of professionals and readers of Ukrainian children’s literature”; PEN Ukraine was named the Ukrainian Book Ambassador for amplifying the voices of Ukrainian authors and promoting Ukrainian culture on a global stage; and a special award provided by Frankfurter Buchmesse went to Creative Women Publishing, “the first feminist publishing house in Ukraine focused on literature for and about women.”

February 6, 2025

Author Pico Iyer, whose memoir Aflame: Learning From Silence was published last month by Riverhead Books, gave a talk at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena, California, in the wake of the devastating Eaton Fire, the Associated Press reports. Iyer shared how his own family home burned down in Santa Barbara in 1990 and explained that right after the fire, all he could see was loss. But decades later, he said, he sees, “all those doors that have gradually opened.” He added that the fire encouraged him to “write a different way, to live more simply, to remember what is really important in life.” “Today,” he said, “I wouldn’t say it was a calamity, but a dramatic wake-up call for me.”

February 6, 2025

Brian Murray, the CEO of HarperCollins, has been elected chair of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) for the 2025–2026 term, Publishers Weekly reports. In a statement, he said: “Our dynamic and rapidly evolving industry faces complex challenges, from addressing AI copyright issues to safeguarding freedom of expression. Now more than ever, the AAP’s mission to champion outcomes that protect and incentivize creative works is critical.”

February 5, 2025

The Giller Prize has cut ties with Scotiabank, an investor in Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems, after more than a year of protests from some in the literary community, the Guardian reports. The prize awards $100,000 Canadian (approximately $69,867) to its winner and $10,000 Canadian (approximately $6,987) to shortlisted authors each year. More than 1,800 writers signed an open letter in support of the protestors in November 2023. In September 2024, the Giller Prize, which was previously known as the Scotiabank Giller Prize, dropped the bank from its name, but only this week announced the end of its twenty-year sponsorship by Scotiabank.

February 5, 2025

Author Neil Gaiman is accused of human trafficking and sexual abuse in a new lawsuit filed by Scarlett Pavlovich, who worked for Gaiman and his estranged wife Amanda Palmer as their family’s nanny, New York magazine reports. The suit also names Palmer for finding Pavlovich for Gaiman and failing to warn her about Gaiman’s past alleged sexual misconduct.

February 5, 2025

Publishers including the Big Five—Penguin Random House (PRH), Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster—as well as other presses, authors, and the Authors Guild have sued the state of Idaho over the state’s HB 710 law, which prohibits anyone under the age of eighteen from accessing books that contain “sexual content,” Publishers Weekly reports. The law makes no distinction between babies and teenagers, and is “exceptionally broad, vague, and overtly discriminatory,” according to a release from PRH. The plaintiffs also argue that the law encourages private citizens to file legal complaints against public libraries and schools, which will increase and intensify censorship across the state.

February 5, 2025

The diary Joan Didion kept twenty-five years ago is about to be made public, the New York Times reports. Didion started the diary around her sixty-fifth birthday and wrote in it after sessions with her psychiatrist. The diary includes notes about her conversations in therapy, which touched on her anxiety, depression, at times fraught relationship with her daughter, and her reflections on her work and legacy. The diary will be published on April 22 by Knopf under the title Notes to John.

February 4, 2025

Hub City Press, John T. Edge, and Alabama Poet Laureate Ashley M. Jones have announced the Deep South Convening on the Future Success of American Writers. The event will bring together authors, literary nonprofits, journal publishers, book publishers, writing programs, and funders in an effort to address “the historical and contemporary challenges that writers in the South face” while amplifying voices from the region. There will be one hundred participants by way of invitation or application and registration will be free. The literary convening will be held on the campus of the University of Alabama in Birmingham, on May 24, 2025.

February 4, 2025

Salman Rushdie is set to testify at the trial of Hadi Matar, the man accused of attempting to murder Rushdie at a literary event in 2022, the Guardian reports. The trial, which begins jury selection today, was postponed from early 2023 when Matar’s defense team requested the manuscript of Rushdie’s memoir Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (Random House, 2024). Rushdie has attributed surviving the assault to a series of “man-made miracles.”

February 4, 2025

Children’s book author Mac Barnett has been named the 2025-2026 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, Publishers Weekly reports. The position was established by the Library of Congress and Every Child a Reader in 2008 “to emphasize the importance of developing lifelong literacy in children and teens.” Barnett said, “I’ve devoted pretty much my whole adult life to writing children’s books (and as a kid, I read them). I can’t imagine a more meaningful recognition.”

February 4, 2025

The PEN/Faulkner Foundation has announced the longlist for the 2025 Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction. The list includes James (Doubleday) by Percival Everett, Small Rain (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Garth Greenwell, and Creation Lake (Scribner) by Rachel Kushner, among other titles. (Read “The Triumph of a Heart: A Profile of Garth Greenwell” in the September/October 2024 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine).

February 3, 2025

An initiative called “100 Days of Creative Resistance” offers to send a free e-mail “of encouragement, opposition, and commiseration” to subscribers for the first one hundred days of President Trump’s term. The program began on January 20, 2025, and has already featured words by R. O. Kwon, Melissa Febos, Denne Michele Norris, and others. Writers who will offer messages in the coming days include Larissa Pham, Jenny Xie, and Julia Philips.

February 3, 2025

Granta Trust is launching a new publishing imprint called Granta Magazine Editions, with three titles in translation forthcoming in 2025, Publishers Weekly reports. The first books are We Would Have Told Each Other Everything, written by Judith Hermann and translated by Katy Derbyshire; Allegro Pastel, written by Leif Randt and translated by Peter Kuras; and Hunter, written by Shuang Xuetao and translated by Jeremy Tiang.

February 3, 2025

On the New Yorker Radio Hour, David Remnick talks with fiction editor Deborah Treisman and poetry editor Kevin Young about the literary anthologies they edited for the magazine’s centennial.

January 31, 2025

Rebecca Yarros’s Onyx Storm (Entangled Publishing) has sold 2.7 million copies in its first week, the New York Times reports. Onyx Storm, which belongs to the romantasy genre and is the third book in a series, has become the fastest-selling adult novel in twenty years.

Literary Events Calendar

Readings & Workshops

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Alla Abdulla-Matta presents her work at the Ninth Annual Connecting Cultures Reading. The event took place at the Center for Book Arts in New York, New York on May 15, 2018. (Credit: Margarita Corporan)
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Poet Juan Delgado at the Cholla Needles Monthly Reading. The event took place at Space Cowboy Books in Joshua Tree, California on October 7, 2018. (Credit: Bob DeLoyd)
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Marty Carrera at the Seventeenth Annual Intergenerational Reading. The event took place at Barnes & Noble Union Square in New York, New York on June 23, 2018. (Credit: Margarita Corporan)

Poets & Writers Theater

Lise Goett reads from her third poetry collection, The Radiant (Tupelo Press, 2024), in this Jules’ Poetry Playhouse virtual reading with Mark Wunderlich hosted by Jules Nyquist and John Roche. The Radiant is featured in... more

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