An investigation by the New York Times reveals how tech companies “cut corners” to train language-generative AI, including ChatGPT and other chatbots. Tech executives “discussed skirting copyright law,” and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, even considered buying Simon & Schuster to have access to longer works.

Goddard College in Vermont, which offered a low-residency MFA in creative writing, has announced that it will close in May due to financial challenges and low enrollment, reports Inside Higher Ed.

PEN America has announced its longlists of finalists for the free speech organization’s literary awards, the winners of which will be announced April 29.

The Associated Press reports on the stress librarians are feeling as conservative activists continue to ramp up efforts to ban books, primarily titles that deal with race and queer themes, from school and public libraries.

The New Yorker profiles author Maggie Nelson.

Literary activists are lobbying to appoint a poet laureate for the city of Austin, Texas, the only city in the Lone Star State without an official bard, reports news channel KXAN.

The shortlist of finalists for the International Booker Prize have been announced: Selva Almada for Not a River, translated from the Spanish by Annie McDermott; Jenny Erpenbeck for Kairos, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann; Ia Genberg for The Details, translated from the Swedish by Kira Josefsson; Itamar Vieira Junior for Crooked Plow, translated from the Portuguese by Johnny Lorenz; Jente Posthuma for What I’d Rather Not Think About, translated from the Dutch by Sarah Timmer Harvey; and Hwang Sok-yong for Mater 2-0, translated from Korean by Sora Kim-Russell and Youngjae Josephine Bae.

Ingram Publisher Services has spurred panic among small presses after issuing deadlines for them to claim remaining book inventory after the closure of Small Press Distribution (SPD), an indie publishing distributor that was partnered with Ingram, reports Publishers Weekly. Small presses have reported not receiving final payments from SPD or clear directions about how to retrieve books that SPD was supposed to distribute for them.

Jina Moore has resigned from her role as Guernica’s editor in chief after the online literary magazine retracted an essay by Joanna Chen about living in Israel in the aftermath of the October 7 attack and the ensuing war in Gaza. Moore says she disagreed with the decision to retract the essay amid criticism that it “normalized the violence Israel has unleashed in Gaza,” she wrote in a statement on her personal website. “Guernica will continue, but I am no longer the right leader for its work.”

The New York Times offers a list of titles that were the most targeted by activists seeking to ban them from school and public libraries last year, which set a new record in book banning efforts nationwide. Gender Queer, an illustrated memoir by Maia Kobabe, is at the top of the list.

The Washington Post offers some tips for finding gems at used bookstores.

Simon & Schuster celebrates its one hundredth anniversary this year; Publishers Weekly looks back at the publisher’s history and considers its future.

The Atlantic considers George Orwell’s 1946 retreat in the Isle of Jura in Scotland, where he wrote 1984.

Caitlyn Shea has been named the new executive director of the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association, which manages the farmhouse in Huntington, Long Island, where Walt Whitman was born in 1819 and which now hosts poetry readings, workshops, and other events.

Ed Simon offers a history of the literary anthology at JSTOR Daily.

The New York Times Book Review interviews U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón.

The Washington Post reports on the closure of Small Press Distribution.

In the Guardian, author Kester Brewin argues that writers should include a transparency statement in their books about their use of AI. “Until we have some mechanism by which we can test for AI—and that will be extraordinarily difficult—we at least need a means by which writers build trust in their work by being transparent about the tools they have used.”

One of the world’s oldest books will go up for auction this spring, reports CNN. The Crosby-Schøyen Codex, a Christian liturgical book written in the Coptic language on papyrus in Egypt, dates between the middle of the third and fourth centuries.

Guadeloupian author Maryse Condé, who in 2018 won the New Academy Prize—an “alternative” to the Nobel Prize in Literature, which in 2018 was suspended due to a controversy—has died at age 90.