Writer Beware provides examples of the latest scams targeting writers, including an e-mail invitation to be a featured guest at a book festival or conference event and an offer to be interviewed on a radio show or podcast. “Unfortunately, AI-driven impersonation scams have glommed onto these events in a big way,” writes Victoria Strauss. “I’m getting a growing number of reports from writers who’ve received credible-seeming invitations that have turned out to be completely fake. It’s yet another area where writers must be extremely careful not to take anything at face value.” Among the details to look out for: “a Gmail, or occasionally an AOL, e-mail address where you’d normally expect the contact to come from a company or event email domain.”

Less than three weeks away from Pride Month, Kelly Jensen of Book Riot has released her annual guide to Pride displays in libraries. Intended primarily “to help library workers consider where and how to showcase LGBTQ+ books, programs, and other materials throughout June,” this year’s overview provides information about what to do if you see instances of censorship and how to write to your local library board about offering LGBTQ+ books and LGBTQ+ programming. “For libraries, Pride has traditionally been a month for joyful displays of queer books, with periodic and predictable complaints,” Jensen writes. “But several years into surging book bans, escalating violence, and swift-rising fascism, it is important to prepare for the upcoming month of events to anticipate all that has, does, and might arise.”

The winners of the 2026 British Book Awards (the Nibbies, as they’re commonly known) were announced at a ceremony in London on Monday, the Bookseller reports. Among the winners are the late Virginia Roberts Giuffre, whose Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice (Doubleday) won Overall Book of the Year as well as Book of the Year in the narrative nonfiction category; Florence Knapp, whose book The Names (Phoenix) won the award in the debut fiction category; and Oyinkan Braithwaite, whose audiobook Cursed Daughters (WF Howes), narrated by Weruche Opia, Diana Yekinni and Nnei Opia Clark, won in the audiobook fiction category.

A recent report from Ashley Woo, an associate policy researcher at RAND, drawing on data from the Spring 2025 American Instructional Resources Survey, offers insight into “concerns about the diminishing role of full books in schools.” The survey results suggest the peripheral nature of full-book reading in most secondary ELA classrooms, while showing that about two-thirds of teachers assigned only one to four books during the 2024-2025 school year. Teachers working with historically disadvantaged groups of students assigned fewer full books. 

The New York Times has profiled Keith McNally, author of the memoir I Regret Almost Everything (Gallery Books, 2025) and the 2026 winner of the $50,000 Gotham Book Prize. McNally, the restaurateur behind NYC establishments such as Balthazar, Cafe Luxembourg, and the Odeon, writes about the successes and failures he’s met throughout his life. Bradley Tusk, a cofounder of the prize, shared that the judging for this year’s award was unusual in that McNally’s memoir received eight of the twelve judges’ votes in the very first round. “I like the idea of rewarding someone for being as self-aware and as accountable as McNally sounds in I Regret Almost Everything.”

Pine State Publicity, a PR firm located in North Carolina and founded by Cassie Mannes Murray in 2022, is starting a boutique literary agency, reports Publishers Weekly. Per an announcement, Pine State Literary (PSL), which is being headed by Zoe-Aline Howard, will focus on “voice-driven adult literary fiction and narrative nonfiction.” Howard states that their books will “challenge what we consider ‘marketable,’ and…break away from oversaturated settings like NYC and LA.” Publishers that Howard feels share an affinity with PSL include the South Carolina-based Hub City Press as well as Milkweed Editions in Minneapolis.

A federal judge has ruled that Department of Government Effiicency (DOGE) acted unconstitutionally when it cancelled more than 1,400 previously-approved grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the New York Times reports. While the ruling orders the cancellations rescinded, judge Colleen McMahon noted the “irreparable” damage done nonetheless: “The injury is not limited to the loss of money. It includes the disruption of protected expression, the interruption of ongoing research and publication, the cancellation or suspension of humanities programming, and the chilling effect caused by the government’s use of viewpoint-based and unauthorized criteria to terminate federal grants.” The terminations had previously come under additional scrutiny when it was revealed that DOGE employees had used ChatGPT to identify grants for cancellation based on keyword searches for terms including “L.G.B.T.Q.,” “BIPOC,” “equality,” “immigration,” and “citizenship.”

Ahead of Mother’s Day, novelist Lisa Owens reflects on the children’s literature that buoyed her family through its earliest days—and her affinity for the harried parents in those picture books’ margins. “The illustrations of the adults, though, were what captivated me: bleary-eyed, multitasking, pregnant, on the phone, clambered upon with glasses askew, cooking, affectionate, exhausted,” writes Owens for the New York Times. “Here was a vision of parenting in the round—the good, the bad and the will you please just go to bed. It brought me great comfort and relief.”

HarperCollins closed its most recent quarter with an 8 percent boost in sales, thanks in large part to the success of Rachel Reid’s hockey romance Heated Rivalry and other titles in the series, Publishers Weekly reports. “Digital sales accounted for 26 percent of revenue in the quarter, up 1 percent from a year ago. In addition to sales of Reid’s books, sales in the quarter benefitted from $6 million from recent acquisitions.”

USA Today looks at the new report by PEN America that shows the number of nonfiction books banned at schools has doubled. The report found that “3,743 unique titles were removed from school classrooms and libraries from July 1, 2024, to June 30, 2025. There were 6,780 total bans across 23 states during that period, according to the organization.” More than 1,000 of the titles, or 29 percent of the total, were nonfiction, more than double the number from the previous year. PEN America says the rise in censorship is due to a widespread “embrace of anti-intellectualism” and that the data “mirrors the broader political attack on facts and knowledge and a skepticism, disdain, and devaluing of experts and expertise—tactics long associated with the rise of authoritarian regimes to sow distrust in democratic institutions.”

Shelf Awareness, the publisher of two newsletters focused on books, bookselling, and book reviews, recently alerted subscribers to the phishing schemes that have become ubiquitous in the publishing and writing communities. “We have learned that Shelf Awareness and its staff are being used in phishing attempts directed at book authors,” the editors wrote in Wednesday’s newsletter. “Shelf Awareness does not charge for review coverage. If you receive an offer over e-mail to review your book in return for payment, it is a scam, and you should not interact with the sender.”

Daniel Umemezie of Cedar Falls, Iowa, was named the 2026–2027 National Youth Poet Laureate at a ceremony in Omaha, Nebraska, on April 25, according to Urban Word. Asked what his focus will be as the youth poet laureate, Umemezie said, “During my tenure as National Youth Poet Laureate, I want to champion work that refuses to make itself legible on anyone else’s terms: multilingual poetry, diasporic poetry, poetry as a form of political insistence, and poetry as self, because I believe that when a young writer chooses to inhabit the fiery tension between who they are and how they express that identity, they embody art itself.” An initiative of Urban Word, the National Youth Poet Laureate program identifies, celebrates, and honors teen poets who exhibit a commitment to not just artistic excellence but also civic engagement, youth leadership and social impact.

Poets & Writers today announced that Marianne Boruch is the winner of the 2026 Jackson Poetry Prize, a $100,000 award given to “an American poet of exceptional talent.” Established in 2006 with a gift from the Liana Foundation, the Jackson Poetry Prize is bestowed annually by Poets & Writers and named for the John and Susan Jackson family. The judges were Major Jackson, Cole Swensen, and Afaa Michael Weaver. “In poems rhetorically sinuous and compelling, Marianne Boruch renders luminous the expanse and reach of human thought,” the judges wrote in their citation. Boruch is an emeritus professor of creative writing at Purdue University, where she founded the MFA program and taught for more than thirty years. She has written eleven books of poetry, most recently Bestiary Dark (Copper Canyon Press, 2021).

Students at Southern Oregon University (SOU) in Ashland are opposing a plan released on Monday “that details some $20 million in suggested cuts from the university, including the Music, Gender Studies, Creative Writing, and International Studies programs,” Ashland.news reports. The school’s board of trustees is expected to vote on the plan on Friday, May 8. “The board must submit the final plan to the Higher Education Coordinating Commission by Monday, May 11, in order to be eligible to receive $15 million in one-time funding from the state of Oregon to keep the university solvent until summer 2027.” Some have accused Deloitte Consulting, a firm that has been actively involved in restructuring SOU, of using AI to formulate the plan; SOU officials have denied the claim.

For the Guardian, Raina Lipsitz takes a closer look at the circumstances surrounding the April decision by the legislature of Green County, New York, to rescind Esther Cohen’s appointment as the county’s first poet laureate after Republican legislator Michael Lanuto performed a “background check” during which he found in Cohen’s social media what he said was “the antithesis of what I believe this board stands for,” citing social media posts “about Zohran Mamdani (for) and Donald Trump (against).” Lipsitz quotes Bjorn Thorstad, founding executive director of the Hudson Valley Writers Residency and a member of the committee that selected the poet laureate, who says people see people view Cohen’s story “as emblematic of the assault on the arts writ large. ... Even though it’s only about one poet, even though government has a right to be discerning about its appointees, it’s nevertheless cutting too close to the bone for people who hate to see leadership leverage power against artists and free speech.”

Best-selling novelist Scott Turow has joined publishers Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Elsevier, and Cengage in filing a class-action copyright infringement lawsuit against Meta and its founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, the New York Times reports. “The complaint, which was filed on Tuesday morning in United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, accuses Meta and Zuckerberg of illegally using millions of copyrighted works to train their artificial intelligence program Llama, and of removing copyright notices and other copyright management information from those works.” The lawsuit also claimes that Zuckerberg personally authorized and encouraged the illegal activity. A Meta spokesperson says the company “will fight this lawsuit aggressively.”

USA Today visits Audible Story House, the world’s first bookless bookstore now open in New York City. The store, which is free and open to the public Wednesdays through Sundays during May, features more than three hundred audiobook titles that customers can sample. “Not quite a bookstore and also not quite a library, Story House is a community hub and listening lounge for readers to hang out and discover a new audio obsession,” Clare Mulroy writes.

Oprah Winfrey has selected John of John (Grove Atlantic, 2026), the third novel by Douglas Stuart, for her book club, the Associated Press reports. The best-selling author won the Booker Prize for his debut novel Shuggie Bain (Grove Atlantic 2020). To read more about John of John, read “Ten Questions for Douglas Stuart.”

Employees at the University of Chicago Press are the latest group of publishing workers to unionize, according to Publishers Lunch, having formed a union with the Chicago News Guild, TNG-CWA Local 34071. “The UPC Workers Guild is seeking recognition from management and ‘is advocating for nothing less than excellence in the treatment of the press’s workers.’ Its mission includes ‘pay equity, sustainability, and transparency.’” Last week workers at Hachette Book Group formed the largest union in publishing history, and in April workers at Catapult unionized.

The 2026 Pulitzer Prizes were announced today. The winner in poetry is Juliana Spahr for Ars Poetica (Wesleyan University Press); the finalists are Douglas Kearney for I Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always (Wave Books) and The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems by Patricia Smith. The winner in fiction is Daniel Kraus for Angel Down (Atria Books); the finalists are Katie Kitamura for Audition (Riverhead Books) and Torrey Peters for Stag Dance: A Quartet (Random House). The winner in memoir/autiobiography is Yiyun Li for Things in Nature Merely Grow (FSG); the finalists are Anelise Chen for Clam Down: A Metamorphosis (One World), Sarah Chihaya for Bibliophobia (Random House), and Hala Alyan for I’ll Tell You When I’m Home (Avid Reader Press).