Daily News

Prolific audiobook narrator Lindsay Dorcus is among a group of six Illinois voice actors, podcasters, and journalists bringing class action lawsuits against tech companies that trained AI models on their “voice footprints,” Publishers Lunch reports. Nine separate lawsuits brought against Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, ElevenLabs, Adobe, and Samsung allege that the vocal talents’ works were “scraped” from internet sources for training purposes without the narrators’ consent, a violation of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). “The Amazon suit is particularly pointed on the topic of audiobook narration, claiming that Amazon’s ignoring BIPA was ‘a deliberate institutional decision.’”

Final approval of a $1.5 billion settlement between Anthropic and authors whose works were used to train its AI model Claude stalled yesterday as the judge in the case asked for more details about “issues including lawyers’ fees and payments to lead ​plaintiffs in what is the largest known U.S. copyright settlement,” Reuters reports. The settlement had received initial approval from Judge William Alsup, now retired, in September 2025, making it the first major U.S. case settled concerning authors’ rights in the training of AI. “Authors and other copyright holders filed claims covering over 92 percent of the more than 480,000 works included in the settlement, an attorney for the authors said during the hearing. The settlement has ​spurred objections from authors who have argued it is not large enough, overcompensates ​the plaintiffs’ attorneys, or wrongly excludes some copyright owners.”

The New York Public Library and Random House Publishing Group are partnering to offer the Kate Medina Fellowship for Literary Narrative Nonfiction to support writers whose projects “engage meaningfully” with the library’s onsite collections, including manuscripts, archives, books, photographs, prints, maps, newspapers, and journals. The selected fellow will receive a stipend of $30,000 to support four months of research between September 1, 2026, and March 15, 2027. Applications are due June 15.

Lee Lai has won Australia’s Stella Prize, becoming the first nonbinary writer and first graphic novelist to take home the prestigious award, the Guardian reports. Lai receives the $60,000 honor for her book Cannon, published by Canadian press Drawn + Quarterly. The book follows a queer Chinese woman living in Montreal who cares for an aging relative by day and works at an upscale restaurant by night. The Stella Prize is offered by the nonprofit Stella, which describes itself as “the major voice for gender equity and cultural change in Australian literature;” the prize was opened to nonbinary writers in 2021.

Texas Book Festival has announced its launch of Burro Libro Press, a new imprint that will focus on “discovering and publishing debut literary fiction by emerging writers with strong ties to Texas.” Developed in collaboration with the Austin-based indie press Deep Vellum Publishing, Burro Libro will find authors through an annual first book contest in which winners will receive publication, $5,000, a professionally-produced audiobook, and promotion at the Texas Book Festival. Submission for the inaugural contest will be open from June 1 to June 30. “We are excited to partner with Texas Book Festival on a program that creates new opportunities for debut fiction writers connected to Texas,” said Jill Meyers, editorial director of Deep Vellum, in a press release. “Deep Vellum has always believed in championing ambitious literary voices, and this collaboration allows us to support emerging authors in a meaningful and lasting way while deepening our partnership with Texas Book Festival.”

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.”

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. 

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.

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

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). 

Pizza Hut’s summer reading program is coming back this year to incentivize young readers with pizza parties, reports People Magazine. The BOOK IT! program recently announced the return of “Summer of Stories,” where kids from pre-K through sixth grade can earn personal pizzas and more for meeting reading goals. This time around, the program is also available for parents and teachers to utilize during the school year. 

Transworld, a division of Penguin Random House UK, is launching the publisher’s first horror imprint, 3AM Books, the Bookseller reports. Led by publishing director Rachel Winterbottom and editorial director Simon Taylor, the imprint takes its name from the witching hour, “the moment when the world feels most heightened, uncanny and like anything might happen.” The list aims to “reflect the full range and ambition of horror today, bringing together established voices, bold new talent and a growing community of readers.” 3AM’s first title, Fawn by debut author and journalist CN Vair, is forthcoming in August.

May is Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month, and the Los Angeles Public Library is celebrating with the third annual AAPI Joy Festival on Saturday, May 16. The free event, themed “AAPI Voices, Then & Now,” will honor the diversity, culture, and contributions of Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander communities through author talks, theater, culinary demonstrations, workshops, and crafts. “Highlights include lion dancers, Japanese dance performances, Korean fabric art, lei making, and the Carlos Bulosan Book Club Awards, presented by the Friends of Echo Park Library, honoring literary figures who have made significant contributions to Filipino American literature and community advocacy.” Featured authors include Livia Blackburne, Jasmin ‘Iolani Hakes, Angie Kang, Stacey Lee, Aimee Phan, Kim-Hoa Ung, and Oliver Wang.

PEN America recently announced that the Rutherford County Library Alliance, a local coalition of library advocates in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, will receive the PEN/Benenson Courage Award at the 2026 PEN America Literary Gala on May 14. “The all‑volunteer alliance galvanized its community against book bans and led opposition to a library board order to remove children’s books deemed ‘inappropriate,’” the organization said in a press release. “The county library director was fired for refusing to carry out the order.” The PEN/Benenson award honors individuals for exceptional courage in defending free expression often in the face of personal danger or intense public scrutiny.

“New York City seems to be undergoing something of a literary revival in recent years,” argues Alicia Kort in TimeOut New York. “While headlines continue to sound alarms about a loneliness epidemic, New Yorkers are increasingly gathering in bars, cafés and bookstores to listen to authors and writers read aloud to crowds.” Kort cites the immense popularity of this year’s BookCon in the city, which sold out four months in advance and drew a crowd of 25,000, and droves of local BookTok fans, “newly voracious readers actually want to get together to discuss the books that have been enthralling them.” Penina Roth, founder of the Franklin Park Reading Series, concurs: “In general, Gen Z seems to be reading more and turning away from online activity, I think likely because of the vitriol on social media and a desire for more real world interaction. Reading is also becoming a less solitary activity.”

A lost copy of the earliest surviving poem in the English language has surfaced at a national library in Rome, reports the Guardian. The newly-uncovered manuscript contains the text of Caedmon’s Hymn, a nine-line verse that the illiterate Northumbrian cattle herder Caedmon originally composed sometime in the seventh century. This iteration of the poem is thought to have been transcribed by an Italian monk sometime between 800 CE and 830 CE, making it the third-oldest known copy in existence. Scholar Mark Faulkner, who discovered the text together with his Trinity College Dublin colleague Elisabetta Magnanti, notes that the text employs full stops after every word, evidencing the recent advent of word spacing:“It is part of the early development of ways of dividing words and shows text starting to come towards the presentation of English that we know today.”

TikTok has released its first monthly BookTok bestseller list in the UK, Books + Publishing reports. “The list features the books that are ‘the most successful titles within the #BookTok community each month,’ and was first launched in Germany in 2023 before expanding to Austria and Switzerland in 2024.” Topping the bestseller list for March, perhaps not surprising, is Rachel Reid’s Heated Rivalry.

As of May 1, DeFiore and Company and the Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency (SKLA) will combine forces to create one larger agency under DeFiore’s name, Publishers Lunch reports. In a statement Brian DeFiore, the founder of DeFiore and Company, said, “The goal is to create an even more supportive, nimble, and powerful framework for all of us to serve our clients masterfully.” Stuart Krichevksy added, “I have always promised myself that I would secure SKLA’s future well before I make any plans to step down, and can think of no better home for the superb team we have built than at DeFiore and Company.” This new firm will be based out of DeFiore’s Union Square offices in New York City. 

Oprah Winfrey has entered into a multiyear licensing deal with Amazon, reports Nicole Sperling of the New York Times. “The former doyenne of daytime talk will produce twice-a-week video podcasts beginning this summer, create specials focused on her Favorite Things and Book Club labels, and repurpose the 25-season library from ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show.’” The tech giant will be promoting Winfrey’s popular book club via Audible, Kindle, and Goodreads to further its reach. Of this partnership, Winfrey stated, “Expanding our reach globally is an opportunity I embrace, as we continue to connect through stories that invite new ways of seeing, and hopefully deepen, understanding.”

Gotham Ghostwriters, an agency specializing in connecting editorial specialists with clients such as CEOs, nonprofit directors, thought leaders, and celebrities, has published a set of guidelines for AI use in an attempt to establish “baseline industry standards for collaborative writers and their clients,” according to Publishers Weekly. “At the center of the guidelines is a page-long list of ‘Recommended Disclosures,’ which enumerates specific ways in which ghostwriting professionals might use generative AI tools for administrative tasks; ‘research, analysis, and collaborations’; and generative uses, including ‘generating initial drafts of text content that will be revised later’ and ‘generating initial drafts of graphics.’” Gotham Ghostwriters CEO Dan Gerstein is quoted in a statement as saying, “We have clearly seen that artificial intelligence has both benefits and pitfalls for writers.... So it’s our central challenge as a profession to find meaningful ways to maximize the opportunities of AI while minimizing the threats.”

Keep in mind that this Saturday, April 25, is Independent Bookstore Day. Indiebound.org has a nifty map of participating bookstores and an extensive list of how those bookstores are celebrating. For more about the history of Indie Bookstore Day and how last year’s special day brought something unexpected to the online retail environment, read “The Clash of Amazon and the Indies” (March/April 2026) by Priscilla Wu. 

Susan Choi and Lily King join four debut authors with titles shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for fiction, the Guardian reports. Choi’s Flashlight and King’s Heart the Lover are shortisted for the prize worth £30,000 (approximately $40,497), along with Dominion by Addie E. Citchens, The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, The Mercy Step by Marcia Hutchinson, and Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly. The winner will be announced on June 11. 

The “new adult” fiction category seems here to stay, observes Daniel Yadin in Publishers Weekly. Fueled by BookTok and a generation of readers raised in the age of “YA juggernaut series,” the “new adult” category has been embraced by Big Five publishers in the last two years. St. Martin’s launched its new adult imprint Saturday Books in 2024; imprints Berkley XO, Requited, and Scarlett Press followed as projects of Penguin Young Readers; Little, Brown; and Simon & Schuster.  “Late teens to twenties is a unique period in someone’s life, and that hasn’t been fully recognized as its own category,” Lisa Yoskowitz, editorial lead of Requited, told PW. “This does feel like the moment to be meeting it.”

Rightsholders for more than 91 percent of the works named in the Anthropic lawsuit have filed claims in the class action settlement for the company’s pirating of books to train their LLM, according to Publishers Lunch. “Attorneys received 119,876 claims by the March 30 deadline, according to the court filing. Those account for 440,490 of the 482,460 works on the works list.”

Eight handwritten letters from John Keats to Fanny Brawne were returned to the family of John Hay “Jock” Whitney, the former U.S. ambassador to the UK, after being stolen from Whitney’s home in the 1980s, the Guardian reports. “Brawne was Keats’s neighbor in Hampstead, with whom he became infatuated and elevated to muse and goddess.” The thirty-seven letters, valued at approximately $2 million, are dated between 1819 and 1820.

Bookshop.org’s sales grew by 55 percent last year, reports Publishers Weekly. Six years since its inception, the online bookseller, which offers a revenue stream to independent bookstores and gives readers an alternative to Amazon in the process, continues to grow due to increased sales for romance books, new e-book sales, and a Spotify partnership, started in February of this year, that allows users to buy print books in the app through Bookshop. “If I told you in 2019 that there was going to be a massive resurgence of indie bookstores after twenty years of decline, nobody would have believed me,” says Andy Hunter, Bookshop’s CEO.

The winners of the 38th annual Publishing Triangle Awards were recently announced. The following ten titles were selected “as the very best in LGBTQ+ literature published in 2025.” Drought by Scott Alexander Hess (Rebel Satori Press) won the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ+ Fiction; Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu (Little, Brown) won the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction; Beyond the Lesbian Vampire: Reclaiming the Violent Lesbian in Contemporary Queer Horror by Sam Tabet (University of Wales Press) won the Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction; Baldwin: A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) won the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction; The Boy Kingdom / El reino de los varones by Achy Obejas (Beacon Press) won the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry; I Do Know Some Things by Richard Siken (Copper Canyon Press) won the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry; Local Woman by Jzl Jmz (Nightboat Books) won the Leslie Feinberg Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature; Mirage City by Lev AC Rosen (Minotaur Books) won the Joseph Hansen Award for LGBTQ+ Crime Writing; We Can Never Leave by H. E. Edgmon (Wednesday Books) won the Jacqueline Woodson Award for LGBTQ+ Young Adult and Children’s Literature; and What Is Queer Food?: How We Served a Revolution by John Birdsall (Norton) won the Amber Hollibaugh Award for LGBTQ+ Social Justice Writing. Each winner will receive $1,000.