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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.
People magazine reports that Geraldine Brooks has won the 2025 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. The annual award is given to an American literary writer “whose body of work is distinguished by not only its mastery of the art, but also its originality of thought and imagination.” Brooks was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for her novel March. Her latest book, the novel Memorial Days, was published by Viking in February.
Spoken, a new AI audiobook company based in Portland, Oregon, claims to offer a process that “deeply analyzes each manuscript and its characters to recommend or custom-generate the perfect voices. These voices—whether drawn from our AI voice actor catalog or crafted from character descriptions—are used to deliver single, dual, or full-cast narration that reflects your story’s tone, texture, and emotional depth.”
Jim Millot of Publishers Weekly reports on the decline in sales for Penguin Random House in the first half of 2025, citing rising costs and uncertainty over the tarrifs imposed by the Trump administration. “Revenue rose to €2.3 billion ($2.6 billion), but operating EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) fell 12 percent, to €255 million ($297.5 million),” Millot writes. “In his letter to employees, PRH global CEO Nihar Malaviya said rising costs were up ‘in nearly all areas of our business.’”
Japanese novelist Rie Qudan talks to John Self of the Guardian about her rationale for using ChatGPT to write her novel Sympathy Tower Tokyo, which won the Akutagawa Prize last year and will be published by Simon & Schuster, in an English translation by Jesse Kirkwood, on September 2. Self writes, “Qudan said that part of it—5 percent was the figure given, though she now says that was only an approximation—was written using artificial intelligence. This, she tells me, comprised parts of the novel which are presented as a character’s exchange with ChatGPT. But Qudan also ‘gained a lot of inspiration’ for the novel through ‘exchanges with AI and from the realisation that it can reflect human thought processes in interesting ways.’ Qudan’s use of AI, in other words, seeks not to deceive the reader but to help us to see its effects.”
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers shared a message on Popville in which she cancelled her appearance at the National Book Festival “due to current events in Washington, D.C.” Jeffers, whose most recent book is Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays & Writings, published by Harper in June, was scheduled to appear in conversation with scholar Imani Perry. Jeffers went on to explain that “given all that’s happening, frankly, as an African American, I’m just afraid to be in that city.” The annual festival is scheduled for September 6 amid President Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops and federal agents in Washington, D.C.
The finalists for the 2025 Kirkus Prize have been revealed, with eighteen books in three categories—fiction, nonfiction, and young reader’s literature—in contention for the annual awards. The winner in each category will receive $50,000. The finalists in fiction are The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai, The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy, Isola by Allegra Goodman, A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar, The Slip by Lucas Schaefer, and Flesh by David Szalay. The winners will be announced on October 8.
Marking the first settlement in a string of lawsuits brought by authors and other copyright owners against large tech companies over their AI training, Reuters reports that artificial intelligence company Anthropic has resolved a class action lawsuit from a group of U.S. authors who argued that its AI training infringed their copyrights. The terms of the settlement have not yet been revealed. “The California federal judge overseeing the case said in a June ruling that Anthropic might have illegally downloaded as many as seven million books from pirate websites, which could have made it liable for billions of dollars in damages if the authors' case was successful.”
Publishers Weekly reports on the publishing industry’s sales estimates for 2024 from the Association of American Publishers. “Total sales rose 4.1 percent, to $32.5 billion, while unit sales increased 3.4 percent, to 3.1 billion,” Jim Millot writes. “The final 2024 numbers combine the $14.2 billion reported to the AAP by the 1,281 publishers who take part in the association’s monthly StatShot program as well $18.3 billion in estimated sales. The new figures show slightly slower growth than those released earlier this year, which only included reported revenue that showed a 6.5 percent sales increase.”
Simon & Schuster today announced that Jonathan Karp intends to step down from his role as CEO. Karp will remain with Simon & Schuster and will become the publisher of a new imprint, Simon Six. In order to ensure a smooth transition and continued focus on Simon & Schuster’s authors, Karp will continue to serve as CEO during the transition. Karp was named CEO of Simon & Schuster in 2020, following ten years as publisher of the company’s flagship imprint. Prior to joining Simon & Schuster, he was the publisher, and editor in chief of Twelve, an imprint of the Hachette Book Group.
PEN America has received a $1.4 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to support its work on the freedom to read, with a heightened focus on supporting public libraries and librarians. “This gift will enable PEN America to extend its groundbreaking research and analysis, public awareness campaigns, and coalition building to include public libraries and librarians who are facing escalating threats to their work, safety and core mission,” PEN America writes.
Matt Enis of Library Journal writes about a new online hub designed for libraries that was launched earlier this summer by Amazon Business, a division of the online retailer. “The hub offers office supplies, IT equipment, furniture, facility maintenance products, and more, as well as a curated selection of print books available for individual purchase at discounts ranging from 30 to 40 percent.” The collections, including books in categories such as biographies and memoirs, literature and fiction, and nonfiction, are selected by Amazon editors based partly on top selling new and preorder titles, Enis writes, with Amazon editors evaluating collections “by taking into consideration lists that appeal to a broad audience and collections that help libraries optimize their ordering,” according to Amazon’s spokesperson.
C-SPAN has announced a new TV series that will feature “thought-provoking conversations with leading authors, policymakers, business innovators and cultural figures,” People magazine reports. Set to debut in the fall, America’s Book Club will be hosted by David Rubenstein, who will be joined by authors John Grisham, Walter Isaacson, Stacy Schiff, and David Grann as well as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Harvard University professor and historian Henry Louis Gates, and chef-restauranteur José Andrés, among others.
According to a report from the BBC, the organizers of the U.K.’s Polari Prize, which celebrates LGBTQ+ literature, have cancelled this year’s prize over objections from nominated authors, judges, and more than 800 people in the publishing industry to the inclusion on the longlist of author John Boyne, whose stance and statements on trans issues and women’s rights, they say, are “inappropriate and hurtful” and “incompatible with the LGBTQ+ community’s most basic standards of inclusion.” The organizers said they hoped the prize would return in 2026.
Ron Charles of the Washington Post writes about the future of book reviews in light of the Associated Press’s decision to no longer produce them. “If you subscribe to one of the few major newspapers with its own books coverage, you’ll be fine,” he writes. “But readers of papers across the country won’t see reviews syndicated from the AP after Aug. 31.”
The National Endowment for the Arts has cancelled its 2026 Creative Writing Fellowships program, Publishers Weekly reports. Writers who had applied were informed by e-mail that their applications were withdrawn and would not be reviewed.
Malcolm Margolin, the founder of the independent press Heyday, died on August 20, Publishers Weekly reports. The recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association, Margolin led the Berkeley-based press for over forty years, during which time he built a reputation for commitment to regional authors and resistance to corporate conglomerates, registering the press as a nonprofit in 2001 to protect its longevity without acquisition by a larger publisher. In a 2015 interview on the occasion of his retirement, Margolin reflected on his life’s work with “pride and amazement at the hundreds of books we’ve published, the communities we’ve nourished, and the wealth of ideas we’ve put forth.”
A new study shows that reading for pleasure has dropped by 40 percent in the United States, the Guardian reports. Collecting data over twenty years, researchers at the University of Florida and University College London found that between 2003 and 2023, daily reading in America, for reasons outside of work or study, fell by around 3 percent each year. Study coauthor Jill Sonke notes, “Our digital culture is certainly part of the story. But there are also structural issues—limited access to reading materials, economic insecurity, and a national decline in leisure time.”
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has announced “an agency-wide reorganization to consolidate its grantmaking programs and divisions.” In a press release, the agency stated plans, effective immediately, to “merge the functions and staff of seven grantmaking offices and divisions into four new divisions to support projects that advance humanities research, education, public programs, infrastructure, and cultural preservation.” The news of this reorganization follows a June reduction in force (RIF) that eliminated two-thirds of the agency’s workforce.
Ahead of a September 1 deadline in a class action lawsuit against the AI company Anthropic, the Authors Guild is recommending authors share their contact information and book titles with the law firm representing writers’ interests in the matter, Publishers Weekly reports. An estimated seven million books are alleged to have been pirated for use in training Anthropic’s AI model, and the Authors Guild believes payouts may range from “$750 per title up to a maximum of $150,000 per title” if the lawsuit is successful. While authors do not need to take any action to be a member of the class, registering with Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein will ensure that writers are apprised of developments with the lawsuit. The case is set to go to trial in December 2025.
Shira Perlmutter, the former register of copyrights and director of the U.S. Copyright Office who is suing the federal government after the Trump administration fired her in May, has once more asked the U.S. District Court for Washington, D.C., to grant “an injunction pending appeal and to end Defendants’ lawless attempt to take over the Library of Congress,” Publishers Weekly reports. Perlmutter’s legal team is urging the court to see the connection between the Office of Copyright’s report on AI, which revealed “the copyright implications for training generative artificial intelligence models,” and Perlmutter’s subsequent dismissal.
A new effort at Riverhead Books will bring more Chinese language literature in translation to American readers, NPR reports. Led by editor Han Zhang, the initiative aims to circumvent systemics obstacles, “both real and imagined,” to “doing business with a country with a pretty intensive censorship structure in place” and offer translations that convey the richness and range of contemporary Chinese literature. The first book in Zhang’s program, Women, Seated by Zhang Yueran, translated by Jeremy Tiang, was released last week. “I think, for a long time, the perception of Chinese literature among Western readers has been quite fixed,” says Yeuran. “It’s often seen as either heavily influenced by Chinese culture, or focused on people living rural, impoverished lives. Which has nothing to do with our lives today.” Other books in Zhang’s lineup include titles from Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Ana Hein writes for Electric Literature about how friendship and collaboration are part of her creative process. Hein explains, “writing need not be inherently isolating…. Writing can be collaborative: reading each other’s notebooks and making margin comments, swapping laptops back and forth to edit at the coffee shop, sending emails and texts and voice notes, asking for ideas and jotting them down to use later, even just talking through a story plot with a trusted ear.” For Hein, writing through friendship transforms the “failures” of “writing—the distractions, the procrastination, the frustrations at [her] limitations and circumstances—and turns them into opportunities for connection.”
The technology studio Hidden Door has opened early access to its literary role-playing platform, Publishers Weekly reports. Hidden Door promises fans of titles such as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz an “immersive entertainment” experience through choose-your-own-adventure storytelling within the worlds of their favorite books. The studio uses a mix of machine learning technology and partnerships with publishers to give readers the power to “explore, expand, and remix” fictional narratives. Hidden Door is primarily using titles in the public domain but is working on licensing agreements for select titles that will involve a revenue-sharing component.
The next manuscript by Amitav Ghosh will not be read for eighty-nine years, as he becomes the twelfth author to participate in the Future Library project, the Guardian reports. Ghosh joins Margaret Atwood, Han Kang, Ocean Vuong, and other renowned authors who have written manuscripts, which will be locked in a public library in Oslo until 2114. The full anthology of texts will be printed using paper made from the Future Library’s forest of spruce trees, which were planted in 2014. (Read “A Library Grows in Norway” from the January/February 2025 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine).
An exhibition featuring the prolific yet often overlooked British poet, literary critic, translator, novelist, anthologist, and biographer Richard Aldington will open at the Grolier Club in New York City next month, Fine Books & Collections reports. Richard Aldington: Versatile Man of Letters will celebrate Aldington’s life and legacy through more than a hundred objects including first editions, typescripts, letters, photographs, and ephemera. The exhibition will run from September 11 through November 15.
Waterstones, a U.K. bookselling chain, which, like Barnes & Noble, is owned by Elliott Management and led by James Daunt, has secured £125 million (approximately $169,180,685) in new financing to support its expansion plans, Publishers Weekly reports.
A federal judge has sided with six publishers, the Authors Guild, and several authors and students in their lawsuit against Florida over a law that bans books that “describe sexual content” in school libraries, Publishers Lunch reports. The law banned books such as Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.
The inaugural Westchester Book Festival, conceived by W. W. Norton vice president John Glusman last spring, will launch on November 8 in Katonah, New York, Publishers Weekly reports. The one-day event will feature sessions run by industry professionals, and authors such as Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah and Emma Straub. All proceeds from ticket sales will benefit local libraries.
Erica Ackerberg writes for the New York Times about a recently published book that collects five hundred years of author portraits. Edited by Alexandra Ault and Catharine MacLeod, Writers Revealed: Treasures from the British Library and the National Portrait Gallery, London (National Portrait Gallery, 2025) includes portraits of John Donne, John Keats, and George Eliot, in addition to other renowned English authors.
Will Atkinson, the former head of Atlantic Books and sales executive at Faber, has launched Wilton Square, a new U.K.-based publisher that intends to acquire titles from the now-defunct publishers Unbound and Boundless, Publishers Weekly reports. Atkinson will serve as joint CEO with Dan Hiscocks of Eye Books. With this new venture Atkinson seeks to both rescue stranded Unbound titles and build an enduring publishing company.
The inaugural Story Feast festival will take place in London on September 13, with the goal of transforming market perceptions and creating more opportunities for East and Southeast Asian authors in the U.K. publishing industry, Publishers Weekly reports. This year’s Story Feast has obtained sponsorship from several publishers including Walker Books, Penguin Random House, Pan Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster, and will feature five panels with approximately twenty speakers across children’s and adult literature.
Additional law firms have joined a lawsuit filed against Anthropic for infringing the copyright of up to seven million books, Publishers Lunch reports. Class action law firm Edelson and the anti-piracy firm Oppenheim + Zebrak have joined the original plaintiffs’ attorneys to support publishers and authors.
Ten authors nominated for this year’s Polari prizes, a set of U.K. awards that celebrate LGBTQ+ literature, have withdrawn their books from consideration over the longlisting of John Boyne, who has described himself as a TERF, the acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminist, the Guardian reports. Two judges have also withdrawn from the jury, and more than eight hundred writers and publishing industry workers have signed a statement calling on Polari to formally remove Boyne from the longlist. The statement says that Boyne’s “public statements on trans rights and identity are incompatible with the LGBTQ+ community’s most basic standards of inclusion,” and points out “the context of rising anti-trans hatred and systematic exclusion of trans people from public life in the U.K. and across the world.” In a statement to the Guardian, the Polari prize said: “The hurt and anger caused has been a matter of deep concern to everyone associated with the prize, for which we sincerely apologize. We accept and respect the decisions of those writers and judges who have chosen to withdraw.” Though the prize is set to continue this year, the Polari prize added that it “will be undertaking a full review of the prize processes, consulting representatives from across the community ahead of next year’s awards, taking on board the learnings from this year.”
Boston Public Library is launching a project this summer with OpenAI and Harvard Law School to make its archive of historically significant government documents more accessible to the public, NPR reports. The documents date back to the early-nineteenth century and include oral histories, congressional reports, and industry surveys. Currently, people who want to access these documents must visit in person. The project will enhance the metadata of each document and allow users to search and cross-reference texts from around the world. AI companies help fund library efforts through the Harvard Law School Library’s Institutional Data Initiative, and in exchange, get to train their large language models on high-quality materials that are out of copyright and thus less likely to lead to lawsuits.
The Associated Press (AP) informed its freelance book reviewers that it will end its weekly reviews starting September 1, Publishers Lunch reports. The AP said it will “continue covering books as stories,” which will be written by journalists on staff. The AP added that the “difficult decision” was made after reviewing the AP’s story offerings and readership and determining that “the audience for book reviews is relatively low.”
Karen Fischer writes for Publishers Weekly about how federal cuts to library budgets will harm publishers as well. If libraries are compelled to decrease acquisitions to their collections due to insufficient funding, publishing companies will inevitably be impacted. Fischer notes that for Dzanc Books, libraries account for 8 to 12 percent of their annual sales. Vida Engstrand, the director of communications at Kensington Publishing, says, “Not being able to put books into libraries will hurt discoverability for newer authors and marginalized authors.” Engstrand adds: “Without libraries, the ecosystem falls apart.”
The Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA) has announced that board chair Tieshena Davis will step down after just over a year in the role, Publishers Weekly reports. IBPA vice chair Renita Bryant will lead the board until it elects Davis’s successor.
When Oprah Winfrey called Richard Russo to let him know that his 2007 book Bridge of Sighs was the August Selection for Oprah’s Book Club, the author didn’t recognize the celebrity’s famous voice until the end of the conversation, according to Entertainment Weekly. “At the end of the conversation, Russo thanked the person he was speaking with and said, ‘And I missed your name.’ ‘It’s Oprah,’ the Emmy winner answered. ‘Oprah Winfrey.’ He understood then. ‘Oprah?’ Russo said before chuckling. ‘I’m so embarrassed.’”
“The fundamental trait of the novels that I like is that people are always wrong,” André Aciman tells the New Yorker. “My own life has been one of always reading people and mistaking one thing for another, so it has been very useful for me to find that the great novelists I love also seem to have been in a state of perpetual error.” Among those novels he discusses is Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton and Emma by Jane Austen.
For the Washington Post, Sibbie O’Sullivan discusses several books, including Scott Preston’s novel The Borrowed Hills (Scribner, 2024), that share what might be a suprising source of inspiration: sheep. “Who cares if they roll around in the muck? Who cares if they’re often the butt of jokes? If sheep help us to be more gentle and patient, to be more herdlike in a kind, communal way,” O’Sullivan writes, “why not make them the center of our story?”
Fearing legal action by the state, school districts in nine Florida counties have removed hundreds of books from libraries ahead of the new school year, PEN America reports. This latest wave of book bans follows a censorship campaign launched by the Florida Department of Education against Hillsborough County, which resulted in the removal of over six hundred titles from school library shelves in May, even though these titles had no challenges filed against them and did not violate state law.
Bloomsbury is beginning to explore licensing authors’ work for AI training, focusing on academic and professional backlist titles, Publishers Lunch reports. The company is “inviting authors to opt-in to AI licensing opportunities,” though a tech company deal has not been finalized. Authors would earn a royalty rate of 20 percent of “Bloomsbury’s net receipts attributable to the relevant works.” With a position like that of the Authors Guild, a Bloomsbury spokesperson said the company believes that AI licensing is a way of protecting copyright.
The National Association of Black Bookstores (NAB2), a member-based nonprofit that aims to support and promote Black booksellers, has launched, Publishers Weekly reports. NAB2 was established by Kevin Johnson, the owner of Underground Books in Sacramento, California, who is also a former professional basketball player. Johnson says he was inspired to launch NAB2 to honor his mother, “Mother Rose” Peat West, who founded Underground Books in 2003 and died last year.
The Library of Congress said a coding error was to blame for the deletion of parts of the U.S. Constitution from Congress’s website, Ars Technica reports. “Upkeep of Constitution Annotated and other digital resources is a critical part of the Library’s mission, and we appreciate the feedback that alerted us to the error and allowed us to fix it,” the Library of Congress said in a statement.
For the New York Times Magazine, Niela Orr writes about Jamaica Kincaid and her new essay collection, Putting Myself Together: Writing, 1974–, published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Orr describes how Kincaid has carried her childhood creativity through five decades of writing: “For the person with a lifelong interest in the way power works, her power is nurturing her access to that impressionable voice, being a student and devotee of it,” Orr writes. “[Kincaid] knows that maturity is not just about repressing the inner child or cradling her but learning how to rouse her from sleep. The secret is in recognizing how much of her she still has access to.”
The Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation will present its inaugural Founders Award to Henry Louis Gates at its annual ceremony on October 17 in Washington, D.C. Henry Louis Gates is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is also a filmmaker, literary scholar, and cultural critic who served as an early advisor to the foundation’s founders.
Independent Publishers Group (IPG) has cut its publishing staff by a third and will reduce its title count by approximately 25 percent, Publishers Weekly reports. Joe Matthews, the CEO of IPG, has characterized the layoffs as part of “a year of transition.”
The National Endowment for the Humanities has announced $34.79 million in funding for ninety-seven humanities projects, many of which celebrate the nation’s upcoming 250th anniversary, Publishers Weekly reports. Projects include the digital publication of the poet Marianne Moore’s literary notebooks; an open access edition of documents related to the naval history of the American Revolution; a digital edition of more than 13,000 speeches, letters, and other writings by Frederick Douglass; and more. Multiple projects respond to President Trump’s executive order regarding “celebrating America’s birthday.”
Kevin Breen writes for the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses about how to identify generative AI in the publishing world. Breen suggests readers look out for writing that is more generalized, stories that have “perfect grammar but thin substance,” and prose that “favors summary and relies less on complex, multi-sentence exchanges of dialogue (for example).” He also encourages readers to trust their critical instincts and recommends some tools that can identify content that was generated by AI.
A first edition of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit has been discovered in a home in Bristol, England, the New York Times reports. The copy, which is one of only about 1,500 first editions printed in 1937, is up for auction and has already exceeded $25,000.
Yale Library has announced its fall exhibitions at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Fine Books & Collections reports. Open from September 2 through May 3, 2026, Textured Stories: The Chirimen Books of Modern Japan will focus on the history of illustrated Japanese crêpe-paper books, which typically feature handmade pages and stories drawn from Japanese fairy tales and folklore. Running concurrently until March 1, 2026, Unfolding Events: Exploring Past and Present in Artists’ Books will display more than thirty artists’ books by contemporary, mostly American artists.
Boundless, the successor to the failed U.K. crowdfunding publisher Unbound, has also filed for bankruptcy just months after it was established, Publishers Lunch reports. Unbound authors were promised that the new company would pay all the money owed to them and have voiced their complaints about the latest filing.
Author J.B. MacKinnon, who is based in Vancouver, has filed four proposed class action lawsuits against technology companies for illegally using copyrighted works by Canadian writers to train their LLMs, Publishers Weekly reports. MacKinnon serves as the representative plaintiff in separate suits against Nvidia, Meta, Anthropic, and Databricks Inc. The lawsuits claim these companies took steps to explicitly conceal their copyright infringement, removing copyright information of books before feeding them into their AI systems, and instructing their LLMs to respond misleadingly when asked about the use of copyrighted text.
