In the days following the Trump administration’s dismissal of the librarian of Congress and the director of the U.S. Copyright Office, the legislative branch is pushing back against executive overreach, Publishers Weekly reports. Control of congress is at stake because the Library of Congress provides an important function for Congress, answering questions on legal matters and supporting research. Current federal regulations would prohibit the executive branch or Department of Justice from accessing what members of Congress are investigating. Six members of the House of Representatives requested “an investigation into, and continued monitoring of, potential improper communications” between the Library of Congress and the executive branch. It seems some discomfort in Congress is bipartisan. John Thune, the Republican majority leader in the Senate, also called for more information about precedents in firing and naming Library of Congress staff.
Daily News
Every day the editors of Poets & Writers Magazine scan the headlines—publishing reports, literary dispatches, academic announcements, and more—for all the news that creative writers need to know.
George Saunders writes an opinion essay for the New York Times criticizing the White House’s dismissal of Carla Hayden, the former librarian of Congress. Saunders, who received the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction in 2023, bonded with Hayden over “the idea that knowledge is power, that in a democracy, the more we know, the better we are.” He calls the White House’s justification for firing Hayden “nonsense,” “sloppy” and “juvenile,” noting that the decision gave him “a visceral feeling for just how diseased this administration really is.”
In her acceptance speech for the Freedom to Publish Award at this year’s British Book Awards, Margaret Atwood said she cannot remember another point in her lifetime “when words themselves have felt under such threat,” the Guardian reports. Atwood said she was both honored and “a little puzzled” to receive the prize, adding, “Unlike so many writers, publishers and booksellers, both in the past and today, I have never been imprisoned—though I may have to revise that statistic if I attempt to cross into the United States in the near future.” The Freedom to Publish Award, which was established in 2022 to “highlight the growing threats to writers, publishers, and booksellers, and to amplify those who fight back,” is awarded by the Bookseller and Index on Censorship.
Audible has announced it is expanding its catalog with AI narration and translation for publishers. “Audible believes that AI represents a momentous opportunity to expand the availability of audiobooks with the vision of offering customers every book in every language,” said Bob Carrigan, CEO of Audible. The company plans to begin releasing AI translations for audiobooks later in 2025. Publishers can opt for “human review from professional linguists to ensure translation accuracy and cultural nuance, and will be able to review the translations themselves in [Audible’s] text editor.”
The Authors Guild has filed a class action lawsuit against the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), its leadership, and officials within the Department of Government Efficiency for unlawfully terminating millions of dollars in grants from funds that are appropriated by Congress. In April, the NEH sent a letter informing grantees that their grants were being terminated because the agency was redistributing its funds “in furtherance of the President’s agenda.” Many grant recipients were abandoned mid-project, even as they were required to forego other employment and compensation during the term of their NEH award. The Authors Guild’s lawsuit “asks the court to find, among other things, that these actions are a violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, the Constitution’s guarantees of the separation of powers and the freedom of expression, and that the actions exceed the congressionally granted authority of agencies.” Additionally, the lawsuit seeks to restore the funds promised to grantees and “require the government to operate the NEH consistent with Congress’s intent.”
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has not clarified how it is implementing new restrictions following Trump’s executive orders, according to the ACLU. Four arts and theater groups filed an amended complaint on Monday seeking clarity on how the NEA plans to address an executive order that forbids federal agencies from spending federal funds on what the government calls “gender ideology.”
Peter C. Baker writes for the New Yorker about how both professional writers and enthusiastic amateurs are experimenting with new forms of literature on Substack. “The literary mainstream has always been shaped (for both better and worse) by intermediary institutions like university creative writing programs, plucky little journals, and newspaper book reviews,” Baker writes. “Perhaps Substack could have a similar era of influence, becoming a place where people gather for an accessible twenty-first-century version of literary community, collaborate on the formation of new readerly sensibilities, and share their own experiments at high speed and low cost.” Still, he writes, it is also possible that the platform will be remembered as “yet another digital space where authors felt the vague obligation to maintain a presence.”
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.
Author Canisia Lubrin, primarily known for her poetry, has won this year’s Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, which celebrates women and nonbinary storytellers in the U.S. and Canada and awards $150,000 annually, NPR reports. Lubrin’s debut fiction work, Code Noir (Soft Skull), is composed of fifty-nine short stories that explore the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and violence in France and the French colonies.
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has rescinded grants to numerous publishers relying on federal funding for the 2025 fiscal year, the Washington Post reports. Mary Gannon, the executive director of the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP), called the news “a tremendous blow for publishing.” According to data gathered by CLMP, of the fifty-one small publishers who receive funding from the NEA, at least thirty have had their grants terminated, including Deep Vellum, the Paris Review, and the Oxford American.
Following the release on Friday of President Trump’s budget proposal that would eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) as well as other arts agencies, the NEA began withdrawing and cancelling grant offers to arts organizations around the country, the New York Times reports. “The NEA is updating its grantmaking policy priorities to focus funding on projects that reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the president,” a portion of the e-mail said. “Consequently, we are terminating awards that fall outside these new priorities.”
In his budget blueprint for the next fiscal year, released on Friday, President Trump proposed eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) along with the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences, the New York Times reports. They were listed in a section of the document titled “small agency eliminations.” The president tried to eliminate both the NEA and the NEH during his first term, but was unsuccessful due to bipartisan support of the agencies.
Judge Richard J. Leon has agreed to “grant in part” the temporary restraining order requested by the American Library Association (ALA) and American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) to “prevent additional harm” to the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), Publishers Weekly reports. In a statement, ALA president Cindy Hohl said, “The immediate halt to the gutting of IMLS is a win for America's libraries and the millions of Americans who rely on them.” Trump’s administration has been attempting to dismantle the IMLS, with only twelve of approximately seventy-five employees remaining at the agency and the rest on administrative leave since April 4. In their lawsuit, the ALA and AFSCME have been advocating for a preliminary injunction to prohibit further destruction of the IMLS.
Harvard University Press (HUP) employees allege that the director of the press, George T. Andreou, belittled employees and drove down acquisitions, the Harvard Crimson reports. HUP published 142 new titles in the fall of 2016, but after Andreou became the director of the press in September 2017, the number of titles released steadily decreased. This past fall, HUP published only twenty-six books. Since 2018, at least fifty employees have left the press, including nine acquisition editors, and several people cited Andreou’s leadership as the reason for their departures. Ian Malcolm, the former executive editor of HUP, wrote in a statement, “it’s not a secret that HUP is an unsettled organization,” adding, “If the problems amount to a crisis, it’s not one that the university’s administration hasn’t been warned about.”
Electric Literature (EL) has announced it is leaving X (formerly known as Twitter). Halimah Marcus, the executive director of EL, explains that the organization has stayed on X as long as it has because, as of last year, 11 percent of EL readers were still finding articles on the platform. When Literary Hub suggested a joint departure from X, the EL staff agreed. Marcus writes that X is now “a dystopian shadow of itself, a vanity project of a destructive, dangerous billionaire—and a very bad place for literature (and most everything else).”
The Novelry, an online writing school, has launched a new contest, the Next Big Story Prize, which will award $100,000 for the first three pages of a book. Eight shortlisted entries will also win free enrollment in the Finished Novel Course from the Novelry. The judges for the Next Big Story Prize are Tayari Jones, Emma Roberts, Julia Quinn, Zibby Owens, Yann Martel, Zosia Mamet, Carley Fortune, Kimmy Nwokorie, Jackie Oshry, and Brady Lockerby.
The BBC has used AI to create writing classes taught by “Agatha Christie,” the Guardian reports. The videos featuring the author, who died in 1976, have been generated with AI-enhanced technology, licensed images, and restored recordings. The writing advice, which includes how to structure a story, craft plot twists, and artfully build suspense, has been drawn from her writings and archival interviews. The videos will be available on the subscription-based education streaming platform BBC Maestro and were made in collaboration with the Agatha Christie estate with the full support of her family.
Penguin Random House and other coplaintiffs are fighting back against Florida’s book banning law, and urging the Florida district court judge Carlos E. Mendoza to make his decision “in a case targeting the improper removal of books from public school classrooms and libraries,” Publishers Weekly reports. Critics argue that the law violates the First Amendment, enables unconstitutional prohibitions on school materials, and fails to recognize the expertise of librarians and educators who choose books for students. Plaintiffs in the suit, which was filed last August, include all the Big Five publishers, in addition to Sourcebooks and the Author’s Guild.
Maya Angelou and Malcom X manuscripts will be on display at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City starting May 8, Fine Books & Collections reports. The manuscripts will be part of a larger celebration of the center’s centenary, which will include a summer festival, book giveaways, a limited edition library card, and a yearlong exhibition called 100: A Century of Collections, Community, and Creativity.
Simon & Schuster and Urano World Publishing have formed a joint publishing arrangement through Primero Sueño Press, an imprint of Atria Books that is committed to publishing Latinx/Latine/Hispanic authors in both English and Spanish, and Urano World, one of the biggest independent publishers in Spain and Latin America, Publishers Weekly reports. A select number of Primero Sueño titles will be published in Spain and Latin America by Urano World and its imprints, which will also distribute titles to most Spanish-speaking regions around the world. The collaboration will also include an inaugural list of more than twenty copublished, translated titles that will be released in the U.S. and in partnership with Urano World.
For Electric Literature, Bradley Sides predicts the winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which will be announced by Columbia University on Monday, May 5, at 3:00 PM EDT. His list of contenders includes Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake (Scribner), Amanda Lima’s Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil (Tor Books), Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars (Knopf), and Percival Everett’s James (Doubleday), among others.
The Mellon Foundation has announced $15 million in emergency funding for state humanities councils after the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) canceled most existing grants following Trump’s executive orders, the New York Times reports. The funding will support humanities councils in all fifty states, offsetting a portion of the $65 million that state councils were expecting to receive from the NEH and providing a crucial lifeline to many humanities programs.
Literary Arts, a community-based nonprofit in Portland, Oregon, announced the 2025 Oregon Book Award winners at a ceremony on Monday. The winner of the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction was Kimberly King Parsons for We Were the Universe (Knopf). The winner of the Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry was Charity E. Yoro for ten-cent flower & other territories (First Matter Press). The winner of the Sarah Winnemucca Award for Creative Nonfiction was Jaclyn Moyer for On Gold Hill: A Personal History of Wheat, Farming, and Family, from Punjab to California (Beacon Press).
A new independent press in London called Conduit Books (not to be confused with Conduit Books & Ephemera in Saint Paul, Minnesota) will publish literary fiction and memoirs, “focusing initially on male authors,” the Guardian reports. The founder, Jude Cook, says, “We believe there is ambitious, funny, political and cerebral fiction by men that is being passed by.”
More than 1,600 independent bookstores across the United States celebrated Independent Bookstore Day on Saturday, April 26, Publishers Weekly reports. Many bookstores—including forty in the Twin Cities, fifty-five in Chicagoland, and twenty-five in Brooklyn, New York—collaborated on crawls, providing passports for customers visiting multiple stores and offering discounts for future purchases.
Poets & Writers has announced that Cyrus Cassells is the winner of the 2025 Jackson Poetry Prize, which carries a monetary award of $100,000. The author of eleven books of poetry, Cassells is the nineteenth winner of the annual award, which is given to “an American poet of exceptional talent.” The judges were James Richardson, Patricia Spears Jones, and Chase Twichell.
D. Graham Burnett wonders if the humanities will survive artificial intelligence in a weekend essay for the New Yorker. He underscores the importance of confronting the widespread use of AI in college classrooms and suggests integrating AI into pedagogy. “An assignment in my class asked students to engage one of the new A.I. tools in a conversation about the history of attention,” he writes. “Reading the results, on my living-room couch, turned out to be the most profound experience of my teaching career…. In a basic way, I felt I was watching a new kind of creature being born, and also watching a generation come face to face with that birth: an encounter with something part sibling, part rival, part careless child-god, part mechanomorphic shadow—an alien familiar.” Burnett goes on to challenge the ideal of knowledge production alone: “But to be human is not to have answers. It is to have questions—and to live with them. The machines can’t do that for us. Not now, not ever.”
A new report from PEN America’s annual Freedom to Write Index found that the number of writers placed behind bars reached a new high in 2024. The Freedom to Write Index has traced a steady increase in the number of writers incarcerated globally, from 238 in 2019 to 375 in 2024, up from 339 in 2023. In 2024, eighty writers were held in pre-trial detention, an increase from seventy-six in 2023. The majority of these cases were reported in China, Egypt, and Israel.
Two new documentaries, Banned Together (2024) and Free for All: The Public Library (2025), highlight anti-censorship activism amidst an increasing number of book bans in the U.S., Publishers Weekly reports. Banned Together, which is now streaming on Apple+ and Amazon Prime, follows high school students in South Carolina as they combat efforts to remove books from school library shelves. Free for All: The Public Library, which will be released on PBS Independent Lens on April 29, features a compilation of contemporary footage and archival material to trace the history of the library as a civic institution in the U.S.
Light and Thread (Moonji Publishing), a book featuring Han Kang’s Nobel Prize lecture, along with other essays and poems by the author, sold ten thousand copies in its first day on sale online, the Guardian reports.
Megan Mabee writes for Book Riot about how to recommend books like an expert. When recommending a book to someone, Mabee advises, consider that person’s favorite books, authors, genres, and preferred moods and pacing in storytelling. Mabee also encourages recommenders to consider a person’s hobbies, interests, and the media they consume—including television, films, and podcasts.
U.K. licensing bodies have announced a collective license that will allow authors to be compensated for the use of their works to train generative AI models, the Guardian reports. The collective license will be available to AI developers this summer and follows a survey conducted by the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society that found 81 percent of respondents wanted to be part of a collective licensing solution if case-by-case licensing was infeasible. The news of the license comes amidst a controversial proposal by the U.K. government to allow AI companies to freely mine copyrighted works unless rights holders opt out.
Literary activist groups have formally condemned Florida House Bill 1539, “legislation they claim would significantly restrict students’ access to books in Florida public schools,” Publishers Weekly reports. The bill would force school districts to remove any book judged to be “harmful to minors” within five days of a challenge, regardless of whether the book has gone through proper review processes. Organizations that signed the letter opposing the bill include American Booksellers for Free Expression, Authors Against Book Bans, the Authors Guild, and PEN America, among others.
All four Shakespeare folios will be auctioned with Sotheby’s for the first time as a collection since 1989, Fine Books & Collections reports. The set, which will be on sale in London on May 23, is estimated to be worth between 3.5 and 4.5 million pounds (between approximately $4,649,773 and $5,978,280).
Book publishers are observing a surging interest in the U.S. Constitution and have been printing new editions, the Associated Press reports. Random House announced a hardcover combined edition of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution to be published in July, followed by a hardcover edition of the Federalist Papers to be published in November. The founding documents are all in the public domain and popular editions have also been released by Skyhorse, Penguin, Barnes & Noble, and others.
The Supreme Court justices seem ready to allow Maryland parents with religious objections to opt their children out of classes with storybooks featuring gay and transgender characters, the New York Times reports. The complaint from parents of multiple faiths claimed that the books “violated the First Amendment’s protection of the free exercise of religion.” This case is one in a string of recent examples where the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of expanding the role of religion in public life.
Ed Nawotka writes for Publishers Weekly about how emerging tech can help the publishing industry as it advocates for AI licensing frameworks to protect authors. For example, the new firm Valent has developed technology to identify when and how much copyrighted material has been used to train an AI model. Louis Hunt, the cofounder and CEO of Valent, explains that Valent also has algorithms that can quantify how certain data could improve an AI model’s performance, which would give copyright holders leverage in licensing negotiations.
The Guardian reports on a new wave of literary parties in the U.K. that feature poetry performances and DJ sets. The Soho Reading series began in the summer of 2023 when Tom Willis, a writer and PhD student, wanted to create a social scene with “literature as the center.” Other literary event series that draw a similarly diverse crowd include New Work, hosted by writers Rachel Connolly and Isis O’Regan, and the popular live readings of The Toe Rag, a London-based quarterly DIY arts and culture newspaper.
Supreme court justices are considering certain picture books with LGBTQ+ themes after parents in Maryland claimed they have a religious right to withdraw their children from classes on days that stories with gay and transgender themes are discussed, the New York Times reports.
The District Court of Rhode Island held a motion hearing on April 18 in an effort to preserve the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Minority Business and Development Agency, and the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, Publishers Weekly reports. The lawsuit, which was filed by twenty-one attorneys general, seeks to restore funding to the agencies and avoid threats to grants that have already been awarded.
Author Neil Gaiman is seeking more than $500,000 from Caroline Wallner, one of the women who has come forward accusing him of sexual misconduct, New York magazine reports. Gaiman, who denies abusing Wallner, has filed a demand for arbitration, accusing Wallner of breaching the NDA she signed when she shared her story with the media.
Clare Mulroy writes for USA Today about the silent book clubs proliferating around the U.S. Though the name is a bit misleading, silent book clubs do not require participants to read the same book. Readers arrive to quietly read with other people. “The trend reflects a growing post-pandemic need to connect in person while also being mindful of social batteries,” Mulroy writes, adding that “Eventbrite shows a 223 percent increase in silent book club events from 2023 to 2024, especially in cities like Chicago, Indianapolis, New York City, Seattle, and Atlanta.”