Arts organizations are reeling as they respond to cuts in federal funding, ABC News reports. Trump has claimed that federal agencies and institutions including the NEA, NEH, PBS, the Kennedy Center, and the Institute for Museum and Library Services have been advancing a “woke agenda.” Electric Literature, McSweeney’s, and n+1 are among the dozens of literary publications that recently learned their grants had been rescinded. Besides supporting literary organizations, federal funding has also benefited individual artists and authors at pivotal moments in their careers. Poet Marie Howe, who was one of this year’s Pulitzer Prize winners, said support from the NEA is not just about the funding—“It’s also deep encouragement,” she said. “It gives you courage. It says to you, ‘Go on, keep doing it.’”

Trump nominated Mary Anne Carter, the former chair of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), to lead the agency days after Trump proposed eliminating the NEA, which has been withdrawing grants from arts groups, the New York Times reports.

The Trump administration has fired Shira Perlmutter, the register of copyrights and director of the U.S. Copyright Office, Publishers Weekly reports. Perlmutter’s dismissal comes just after she released the third part of a preliminary report on copyright and artificial intelligence. Some have speculated that Perlmutter’s dismissal was due to her release of the report, while others have suggested that Perlmutter heard of her impending dismissal and wanted the report to be released beforehand to ensure it entered the public record. The report states that “the copying involved in AI training threatens significant potential harm to the market for or value of copyrighted works,” but also acknowledges that the “assessment of market harm will also depend on the extent to which copyrighted works can be licensed for AI training.”

Deputy attorney general Todd Blanche, who represented Trump during his 2024 criminal trial, has been named acting librarian of congress, the Associated Press reports. Blanche succeeds Carla Hayden, who was fired abruptly by the White House last week amid criticism from some conservatives that she was advancing a “woke” agenda.

University College London has acquired an archive of George Orwell’s correspondence, manuscript notes, readers’ reports relating to his earliest novels, and other historic papers that were at risk of being dispersed, the Guardian reports. The archive, which belonged to Victor Gollancz, Orwell’s publisher, contains about 160 items dating from 1934 to 1937 and will be added to the Orwell Archive in UCL Special Collections.

The Charles Dickens Museum will celebrate its hundredth anniversary on June 9 by offering free entry to the author’s former home in London, the BBC reports. Visitors can meet Dickens’s living descendants and attend readings and talks that will take place in each of the museum’s historic rooms.

The annual PEN America Literary Awards were held Thursday in New York City after a turbulent year of protests over the organization’s response to Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, Publishers Weekly reports. Multiple writers withdrew their books from consideration, so for the second year in a row, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award was not conferred. In lieu of an author receiving the $75,000 prize, the funds will be divided between two nonprofits: the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, which provides “humanitarian aid for children living among devastation and displacement,” and Palestine Legal, “a legal aid organization dedicated to protecting the civil and constitutional rights of people in the U.S. who speak out for Palestinian freedom.” Seven of the fifty-five finalists across eleven award categories withdrew their works from consideration this year.

Trump has fired Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress, who was the first woman and the first African American to hold the position, the Washington Post reports. Hayden previously led Baltimore’s library system and served as president of the American Library Association from 2003 to 2004. In a statement, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (Connecticut) called for the White House to explain its decision, writing, “Every Member of Congress I know—Democratic or Republican—loves and respects Dr. Carla Hayden…. [Her] tenure has been marked by a steadfast commitment to accessibility, modernization, and the democratization of knowledge. Her dismissal is not just an affront to her historic service but a direct attack on the independence of one of our most revered institutions.”

In a statement to Retail Brew, Amazon claimed its annual book sale “unintentionally overlapped” with Independent Bookstore Day on April 26, but Amazon did not promise to avoid the national indies sales event in the future. This year, Amazon held its annual book sale from April 23 to April 28, which Ray T. Daniels, the chief communications officer of the American Booksellers Association (ABA) criticized as “predatory.” Ironically, Amazon’s ill-timed sale may have driven even more customers to indies this year in protest. Among the 560 bookstores that use ABA’s e-commerce platform, there was a 77.41 percent increase in online sales over Independent Bookstore Day in 2024. Bookshop.org also saw a 170 percent sales increase over last year.

Though the consequences of tariffs on the book publishing industry could lead to declines in discretionary spending, a new report from BookScan suggests books are in a better position than many other goods, Publishers Weekly reports. In times of economic uncertainty, the report notes, “consumers are more likely to pull back spend on higher-ticket items, like technology and apparel, and favor items that they see as having a high perceived value, like books.” A significant data point from BookScan’s analysis is that 50 percent of new book buyers report that they are reading somewhat more or much more compared to the same time a year ago. This increased engagement with books, the study found, will likely benefit sales in the near-term.

Alexandra Alter writes for the New York Times about the complicated deliberation process that led to Percival Everett winning the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for James (Doubleday). The prize went to Everett after the Pulitzer committee’s board could not agree on the three finalists that the fiction jury initially presented: Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot (Viking), Stacey Levine’s Mice 1961 (Verse Chorus Press), and Gayl Jones’s The Unicorn Woman (Beacon Press). Alter notes that “some observers expressed skepticism about this year’s process,” quoting the writer and bookseller Drew Broussard, who questioned whether the Pulitzer board had overruled the jury’s selections of a “world-shaking all-woman trio of finalists in a year when one novel by a male writer has taken up quite a lot of the available oxygen.” But Levine, one of the finalists, dismissed that speculation, emphasizing that in a moment when diversity initiatives and public funding for the arts are in danger, the Pulitzer Prize stands for integrity. In an e-mail, Levine wrote, “Percival’s book is so important in this regard…. Is this really the time to fuss about what might or might not be gender politics in a literary contest?”

Lawrence Venuti writes about the dilemmas facing contemporary translation and its commentary for Public Books. “Translation is imagined as mechanical transfer,” he writes, “so transparent as to be invisible, not particularly resourceful or creative, certainly not an interpretive act in its own right. Would we get a different view of translation,” he asks, “one that is both more illuminating and more appreciative, if we turned to translators themselves?”

Ploughshares has appointed Jenny Molberg as its new editor in chief. Molberg joins Ploughshares from the University of Central Missouri where she worked as a professor of creative writing, directed Pleiades Press, and edited Pleiades: Literature in Context. In addition to serving as the new editor in chief of Ploughshares, she will work as a professor of writing, literature, and publishing at Emerson College in Boston. In a letter announcing her new role, Molberg wrote, “I think of great writing as advocacy for conditions of peace—a repurposing of toxic power and suffering—a call for action, for radical joy. Through this lens, I recognize my responsibilities to the authors I help edit and usher into the world, the students I teach, and the literary world writ large.”

The District Court of Rhode Island has granted twenty-one states’ attorneys general the preliminary injunction they sought to stop the dismantling of the Institute of Museum and Library Services and two other federal agencies, Publishers Weekly reports. The judge overseeing the case emphasized that Congress controls the agencies and designates their funding, adding that Trump’s executive order “disregards the fundamental constitutional role of each of the branches of our federal government.”

The Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association has announced Bernard Shapero as its new president, Fine Books & Collections reports. Shapero joins with forty-five years of experience in the rare book world and runs his own bookshop and gallery in London called Shapero Rare Books. He said, “I look forward to working with all our members to carry on with their good work and hope that the rare book world will continue to thrive in the U.K.”

Globe Pequot Publishing Group has acquired Bower House Books, an independent press based in Denver, Publishers Weekly reports. The acquisition is Globe Pequot’s third this year, following the purchase of Square One Publishers last week and the purchase of Waterford Press in March. After selling the academic publisher Rowman and Littlefield to Bloomsbury for $83 million last year, Globe Pequot has been focusing more on trade publishing.

The 2025 Pulitzer Prizes were announced yesterday by Columbia University. Percival Everett won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for James (Doubleday); Marie Howe won the prize in poetry for New and Selected Poems (Norton); Edda L. Fields-Black won the prize in history for Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War (Oxford University Press) along with Kathleen DuVal for Native Nations: A Millennium in North America (Random House); Jason Roberts won the prize in biography for Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life (Random House); Tessa Hulls won the prize in memoir or autobiography for Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir (MCD); and Benjamin Nathans won the prize in general nonfiction for To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement (Princeton University Press). The winners each received $15,000.

A group of senior officials at the NEA have announced their resignations, Michael Paulson reports for the New York Times. “Among those leaving the agency are directors overseeing grants for dance, design, folk and traditional arts, and theater, as well as the director of the ‘partnership’ division, which oversees work with state and local arts agencies,” Paulson writes. Amy Stolls, literary arts director, is among those leaving the agency, as previously reported.

Publishers Weekly has reported more details about the termination of dozens of NEA grants as well as staff changes at the agency in light of Trump’s executive orders and Friday’s budget proposal.

The Community of Literary Magazines and Presses and LitNet, a coalition of literary organizations that works to promote the importance of the literary arts in American culture and build the capacity of the literary field, sent members an e-mail this morning from four members of the Literary Arts staff of the NEA, including Amy Stolls, Literary Arts Director, informing them that their last day at the agency will be May 30, Publishers Lunch reports.