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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.
Clare Mulroy writes for USA Today about the danger AI poses to book publishing. Using the AI-generated reading list in the Chicago Sun-Times as an example, Mulroy points out that AI-generated articles could further erode trust in journalism. Furthermore, she argues that as a man-made product, generative AI “can amplify human biases, especially when it comes to representing women, LGBTQ+ individuals, and people of color.”
Ahead of Memorial Day weekend and the unofficial start of summer, a number of publications have released summer reading lists, including the New York Times, NPR, the Atlantic, and the Washington Post.
The African American Literature Book Club (AALBC) has launched the BLK Bestseller List, which features the bestselling books by Black authors over the last sixteen months, Publishers Weekly reports. The list is one part of the Black Book Accelerator initiative, which seeks to boost the sales of books by Black authors. The group behind the initiative includes AALBC founder Troy Johnson, Hachette chief diversity officer Carrie Bloxson, and Serendipity Literary Agency CEO and president Regina Brooks.
Most of the nearly four hundred books that were removed from the Naval Academy library in April have been returned to the library’s shelves, the Associated Press reports. The original list of books, which included Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, were taken from the library to comply with the Trump administration’s efforts to purge “DEI content” from federal agencies. Earlier in May, the directive changed to pull and review all library books that addressed “diversity, anti-racism, or gender issues,” according to the AP. A temporary academic libraries committee is overseeing the new book review process with search terms that include, “affirmative action, anti-racism, critical race theory, discrimination, diversity, gender dysphoria, gender identity and transition, transgender and white privilege.” The Navy has not confirmed which books have been returned to the library.
Lisa Ko, the author of The Leavers (Algonquin, 2017) and Memory Piece (Riverhead, 2024), posted on Bluesky on Tuesday saying that blurbs she did not write have been attributed to her on the web pages of many books, including several HarperCollins titles, Publishers Lunch reports. A representative for HarperCollins said the error is being fixed, adding, “This was due to a data error in one of our marketing systems and it is being corrected. It was not AI related.”
The International Publishers Association (IPA) has alerted its world membership that Russian publishing figures are being arrested for publishing “LGBT propaganda,” Publishing Perspectives reports. The Russian supreme court effectively outlawed LGBTQ+ activism in November 2023 and characterized the LGBTQ+ “movement” in Russia as “an extremist organization.” Those detained for questioning on May 14 included Anatoly Norovyatkin, the distribution director of the publisher Eksmo; Dmitry Protopopov, a cofounder of Popcorn Books; and Pavel Ivanov, a former sales director. Three people, whose names have not been publicly released, were formally charged on May 15 for “involvement in the activities of an extremist organization,” according to Amnesty International. The Freedom to Publish committee of the IPA has declared support for the arrested individuals and is urging the Russian authorities to drop any charges.
Several former National Ambassadors for Young People’s Literature have announced their opposition to the Trump administration firing Carla Hayden from her role as Librarian of Congress, Publishers Weekly reports. The joint statement decrying the decision was signed by past ambassadors Jon Scieszka, Katherine Paterson, Kate DiCamillo, Gene Luen Yang, Jacqueline Woodson, Jason Reynolds, and Meg Medina.
The Chicago Sun-Times has released a response to the May 18 special section that contained a reading list with AI-generated titles of books that do not exist. The statement explains that the section was licensed from King Features, a unit of Hearst, one of the newspaper’s national content partners. The special section was syndicated to the Chicago Sun-Times and other newspapers. King Features released a statement to Chicago Public Media saying it had “a strict policy with our staff, cartoonists, columnists, and freelance writers against the use of AI to create content. The Heat Index summer supplement was created by a freelance content creator who used AI in its story development without disclosing the use of AI. We are terminating our relationship with this individual.” The Chicago-Sun Times apologized both for printing content that was inaccurate and for not acknowledging “that the section was produced outside the Sun-Times newsroom.” The Sun-Times also announced that subscribers would not be charged for the edition, that the section has been removed from the e-paper version, and that the paper is updating policies so that all third-party licensed editorial content complies with the newspaper’s journalistic standards. The Sun-Times added that it will “explicitly identify third-party licensed editorial content and provide transparency about its origin.”
Social media is influencing how authors promote their books, NPR reports. Over the last few months, authors and content creators have debated the importance of book blurbs, especially because they are time-consuming for authors working on their own books. The online book community is becoming increasingly important for generating buzz about a title, and author Chip Pons, who started as a “bookstagrammer,” says, “I think we are going to start seeing book influencers’ names on the covers of books, on the backs of books.”
Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp (And Other Stories, 2025), translated from the Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi, is the first story collection to win the International Booker Prize, the New York Times reports. Heart Lamp follows the daily struggles of Indian Muslim women as they navigate their husbands, mothers, and religious leaders. The prize comes with £50,000 (approximately $66,700), which the author and translator split evenly.
On Sunday, the Chicago Sun-Times published a summer reading list with at least ten fake books attributed to real authors, Ars Technica reports. The list included titles such as “Tidewater Dreams” by Isabel Allende and “The Last Algorithm” by Andy Weir—books that do not exist and were generated by AI. The creator of the list, Marco Buscaglia, confirmed to 404 Media that he used AI to generate the content: “On me 100 percent and I’m completely embarrassed,” he said. The Chicago Sun-Times announced that it is looking into how the list was printed, adding that “It is not editorial content and was not created by, or approved by, the Sun-Times newsroom.” The reading list ran as part of a supplement called “Heat Index” which is a promotional section that was meant to be inserted into newspapers nationally.
A previously unpublished collection of stories by Katherine Dunn, the author of the cult classic Geek Love who died in 2016, will be released in October. Near Flesh, which contains stories about motherhood, violence, and desire, will be published by MCD, the imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux that published Dunn’s posthumous novel Toad in 2022.
The Trump administration is appealing the injunction ordered by Judge John J. McConnell, Jr. to stop the dismantling of the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), Book Riot reports. The appeal seems to align with the Trump administration’s history of using legal delay tactics to avoid compliance with court orders. Trump’s proposed 2026 budget slashes the IMLS altogether.
Adam Morgan writes for the Los Angeles Review of Books about small publishers and literary magazines left reeling after Trump defunded the NEA. “All fifty-one of this year’s grantees in the literary arts category received either termination letters or withdrawal letters,” according to Mary Gannon, the executive director of the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses. The canceled literary grants amount to just 0.0000002 percent of the U.S. government’s 2025 budget.
Sarah Lyon writes for the New York Times about how bibliophile couples are weaving books into their engagements and nuptials. These creative events include bookstore proposals, literary scavenger hunts, and wedding day dinners with books at each table setting.
Kazuo Ishiguro discusses adapting literature to film and the recent adaptation of his novel A Pale View of Hills (Putnam, 1982) with the Associated Press at the Cannes Film Festival. For a cinematic version of the story to work, he says, “It has to be a personal artistic expression of something, not just a reproduction.” He adds, “The great stories are the ones that last and last and last. They turn up in different forms.”
Karen Fischer writes for Publishers Weekly about how rural libraries may not be able to survive the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS). Though there are multiple lawsuits to reinstate the federal funding, some rural libraries cannot afford to pay their own bills in the meantime. Many of these libraries provide important social infrastructure beyond books. For instance, many children spend time at the Cherokee Public Library in Iowa after school until their parents finish their workdays. And in Pottsboro, Texas, the public library debuted a pilot telehealth program with a cordoned-off, reservable booth so people could come to the library for medical appointments and avoid long drives to see doctors.
Hadi Matar, the man convicted in February of attempting to murder author Salman Rushdie in a knife attack in 2022, has been sentenced to twenty-five years in prison, the New York Times reports.
The Authors Guild has launched a petition to reinstate Shira Perlmutter as Register of Copyrights and Director of the U.S. Copyright Office. The Trump administration fired Perlmutter last week and is attempting, according to the petition, “to install an administration official with no apparent copyright expertise.”
Norrell Edwards writes for the Los Angeles Review of Books about the Trump administration’s termination of National Endowment for the Humanities grants. “The decimation of the National Endowment for the Humanities means that many states will have virtually no state funding for cultural activities,” Edwards writes. “While this is an attack on public education in line with the administration’s decision to shutter the Department of Education and police the most prestigious and elite universities, it is also part of a larger agenda to end federal public service.”
Kwame Anthony Appiah considers whether it is ethical to buy used books for the New York Times Magazine’s Ethicist column. “What artists, especially the good ones, are owed is not a cut of every encounter we have with their work but a system that gives them a real opportunity to sell their work, to build a career, to find a public,” Appiah writes. “After that, their creations rightly become part of the wider cultural world, as with books in a library or paintings in a museum, where countless people can enjoy them freely across the generations.”
Salman Rushdie has pulled out as Claremont McKenna College’s graduation speaker after Muslims students and advocacy groups raised concerns about the author’s past remarks on Islam and Palestine, the Los Angeles Daily News reports.
A man in Ohio has been accused of burning a hundred library books on Jewish, African American, and LGBTQ+ topics, USA Today reports. The Princeton University Bridging Divides Initiative, a non-partisan research organization that tracks political violence and hate crimes in the U.S., contacted the library about videos it spotted online of books that had Cuyahoga County Public Library stickers. Democratic state Senator Kent Smith condemned the act calling it “a crime against our institutions and community” and “fundamentally un-American.”
A federal judge in Rhode Island has ordered a halt to Trump’s executive order dismantling the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and two more federal agencies, Publishers Weekly reports. The court order instructs the defendants—among them IMLS acting director Keith Sonderling and President Donald Trump—to stop efforts to eliminate the IMLS, resume the distribution of allocated funding, and to file a status report confirming “full compliance with” the court order within seven days.
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.
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.”
