Jump to navigation Skip to content
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.
Alex Reisner writes for the Atlantic about the scale of book piracy Meta relied on to develop its AI. The company downloaded millions of books from illegal sites like LibGen, which contains more than 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers. Meta and OpenAI have both argued that it is “fair use” to train their AI models on copyrighted work because LLMs “transform” the original text into new work.
Monica Youn will serve as the next judge of the Yale Younger Poets Prize, the oldest annual literary award in the United States. Youn succeeds Rae Armantrout, who judged the prize from 2021–2025. The 2026 competition will open for submissions on October 1 and close on November 15.
The National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) has announced the winners for books published in 2024, marking fifty years of the awards. The fiction winner was My Friends (Random House) by Hisham Matar; the nonfiction winner was Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space (Avid Reader) by Adam Higginbotham; and the poetry winner was Wrong Norma (New Directions) by Anne Carson. NBCC also honors individuals and institutions for their achievements and contributions to the book publishing industry. The recipient of the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award was Sandra Cisneros; the recipient of the Toni Morrison Achievement Award was Third World Press; and the NBCC Service Award went to Lori Lynn Turner.
The shortlist for this year’s Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize has been announced, the Guardian reports. The prize celebrates fiction in all its forms (including poetry, novels, short stories, and drama) written by authors aged thirty-nine or younger. The 2025 shortlist includes Seán Hewitt (Rapture’s Road), Ferdia Lennon (Glorious Exploits), Yael van der Wouden (The Safekeep), Rebecca Watson (I Will Crash), Eley Williams (Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good), and Yasmin Zaher (The Coin). The winner will be announced on May 15 and receive 20,000 pounds (approximately $25,934).
The British Library has confirmed a new construction development worth 1.1 billion pounds (approximately $1.4 billion) of the Library’s St. Pancras site in London, Fine Books & Collections reports. The development will allow hundreds of thousands more people to visit the library’s exhibitions, programs, and events each year. The development is funded by Mitsui Fudosan, and will include new galleries, expanded and diverse spaces for business support services, a new learning center for enhanced educational experiences, and a multi-use foyer space.
Claire Kirch writes for Publishers Weekly about how the indie bookstores in Washington D.C. are responding to government layoffs. Approximately 450,000 federal employees live, work, and shop in Washington D.C., and some indie booksellers have reported declines in traffic and sales. Others have reported customers buying more books, looking for “escapist” literature or sharing “that they’re out of work and so have more time to read.”
Black Lawrence Press is expanding its efforts to highlight the writing of American immigrants. In addition to the new titles published through its Immigrant Writing series, the press has recently launched the Black Lawrence Fellowship for New Immigrant Authors, which is open for submissions through April 30. The fellowship provides financial and editorial support for immigrant authors with no more than one book at the time of application.
The shortlist for the inaugural Climate Fiction Prize has been announced, the Guardian reports. Sponsored by the global organization Climate Spring, the Climate Fiction Prize will be awarded annually to “the best novel-length work of fiction published in the UK engaging with the climate crisis.” The shortlist includes Orbital (Jonathan Cape, 2023) by Samantha Harvey and The Morningside (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2024) by Téa Obreht, among other titles. The winner will be announced on May 14 and receive 10,000 pounds (approximately $12,966).
Spotify is expanding its audiobook platform to self-published authors, Publishers Weekly reports. The new initiative invites authors to submit short-form work for possible audiobook production and distribution through Spotify’s in-house publishing imprint. The program is focusing on romance, mystery/thriller, and sci-fi/fantasy “novelettes” ranging from ten thousand to twenty thousand words. Since launching its premium audiobook offering in the fall of 2023, Spotify has nearly tripled its English-language audiobook catalog, from around 150,000 to more than 400,000 titles. The platform has seen a 30 percent year-on-year increase in users across its initial launch markets and a 35 percent growth in listening hours.
Kate Millar interviews Pádraig Ó Tuama about religious trauma, desire, and poetry as prayer for Public Books. Ó Tuama discusses the limitations of the word “believe,” sharing, “I began to look for other verbs when it comes to my doubt and my rage and my yearning and my suspicion and my sadness, all gathered around the question of God—my politics of the question of God.” He adds, “The source of prayer, or yearning, or praise, or lament, or rage, needs to find an expression. Isn’t that what poetry is?”
The Book Collector, a quarterly publication focused on the writing, publishing, and collecting of books, has announced David Pearson as its new editor, Fine Books & Collections reports. Pearson has worked in various major libraries in the UK, including the British Library, the National Art Library at the V&A, and the Wellcome Library. The Book Collector was founded by Ian Fleming in 1952 and digitized its archive in 2020.
PEN America has announced that its World Voices Festival and Literary Awards will return this year after being canceled in 2024 due to protests over the organization’s response to the war in Gaza, Publishers Weekly reports. The 2025 PEN World Voices Festival will run from April 30 to May 3, and the 2025 PEN America Literary Awards ceremony is set for May 8. In a statement, Summer Lopez, interim co-CEO and chief program officer of free expression, said: “Our work is not done to repair and regain the trust of not just Palestinian writers but all writers and members of our community.”
The Association of American Publishers (AAP) is urging the White House to prioritize copyright as Trump’s administration develops an AI action plan, Publishers Weekly reports. AAP has called for bolstered copyright protections, the promotion of licensing agreements, increased transparency requirements, a rejection of expanded fair use arguments, and the condemnation of using pirate sites for AI training.
Library funding is targeted in another executive order by Trump, Kelly Jensen reports for Book Riot. The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) is the only federal agency that distributes funding to libraries, as well as library, museum, and archival grant programs. The order states that the IMLS must be reduced to “statutory functions” and that expenses must be cut as much as possible. In a statement the American Library Association said: “To dismiss some 75 committed workers and mission of an agency that advances opportunity and learning is to dismiss the aspirations and everyday needs of millions of Americans.” IMLS receives .0046 percent of the federal government’s overall budget, and the order gave the agency seven days to report back. Public libraries, including school and academic libraries, could see their budgets destroyed as soon as this Friday, March 21.
French publishers and authors represented by three trade groups are suing Meta for using copyrighted works to train AI, the Associated Press reports. Vincent Montagne, the president of the National Publishing Union, which represents book publishers, accused Meta of “noncompliance with copyright and parasitism.” Under the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act, generative AI systems must adhere to copyright law and be transparent about the material they used for training.
OpenAI has declared the AI race with China will be “over” if training AI on copyrighted works is not considered fair use, Ars Technica reports. While rights holders say AI models trained on creative works threaten their value in markets and weaken humanity’s creative output, AI companies are arguing that AI transforms the copyrighted works it trains on. OpenAI is now appealing to Trump, requesting legal protection from the hundreds of state laws attempting to regulate AI, and asking the president to support the AI industry’s “freedom to learn.”
Shelly C. Lowe, a scholar of higher education and the first Native American to serve as chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), has left her position “at the direction of President Trump,” the New York Times reports. Agency chairs typically serve four-year terms, though some continue in their roles despite changing administrations. Founded in 1965, the NEH has awarded more than $6 billion in grants to museums, historic sites, universities, libraries, and other organizations. Lowe’s departure comes amidst Trump’s upheaval of cultural agencies, including the Kennedy Center, where he fired Biden appointees from the bipartisan board, dismissed the center’s president, and had himself elected chairman.
The 2025 David Ruggles Prize, established to support young book collectors of color, is open for entries until June 8, Fine Books & Collections reports. The international prize is open to any collector aged thirty-five or younger. Collections need not consist of only traditional books—comic books, graphic novels, zines, contemporary book art, and handwritten manuscripts all count. The grand prize is $1,000, the second prize is $500, and the third prize is $250. The award is named for David Ruggles, an American abolitionist, publisher, and Underground Railroad conductor, who opened the country’s first Black-owned bookstore.
Wiley released detailed guidance for authors on how they can use AI ethically and effectively in their research and writing, Publishers Weekly reports. The guidelines address the development of effective prompts when using AI, the comparison and assessment of AI tools for accuracy, privacy, and intellectual property, and the disclosure of AI usage in published works.
Alissa Quart writes for Time magazine about why she is replacing the endless scroll of depressing news with poetry. In poetry, she writes, “I have…found a reprieve from my anxious inattention.” “More specifically,” she has sought out “the poetry of survival—verse written in the shadow of political extremity.” Poems, Quart adds, “can ultimately offer us some moral direction.”
The nonprofit We Need Diverse Books (WNDB) is launching its inaugural “We Need Diverse Books Day” on April 3 to underscore the importance of access to inclusive reading, USA Today reports. WNDB will celebrate its tenth anniversary of programming this year by donating ten thousand titles to schools and libraries across the country. A 2023 study conducted by the nonprofit First Book found that students read more when educators add diverse books to their libraries. While 99 percent of surveyed educators agreed that a diverse library is vital, only 58 percent said their library is as diverse as their students.
Author Jesmyn Ward discusses the rewards of reading laborious novels with the New Yorker and recommends some of her favorites. Ward’s list includes books written in a range of styles and time periods, such as the 1923 novel Cane by Jean Toomer, Toni Morrison’s 1987 classic, Beloved, and Bunny (Viking, 2019) by Mona Awad. Ward says, “Sometimes being bewildered is just part of reading,” adding, “Anytime that a story asks you to do a lot of work to understand the world and the characters being constructed, there’s something to be learned.”
In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, wrote, “We trained a new model that is good at creative writing,” adding that it was the first time he has “been really struck by something written by AI,” the Guardian reports. Altman’s comments come amidst a series of lawsuits against tech companies for training artificial intelligence on material protected by copyright.
The majority of books banned during the 2023–2024 school year featured characters of color and LGBTQ+ characters and subjects, USA Today reports (via PEN America). Of all the history and biography titles banned, 44 percent featured people of color. The states with the most book bans were Florida and Iowa.
Five years after the outbreak of COVID-19, Lily Meyer writes for the Atlantic about the pandemic novel she is still searching for, one “that truly submits to the uncontrollable reality” of that time. She writes: “All of my searching for a great pandemic novel has taught me that real literature about crisis has to come from more than anger or terror, more than the fundamentally self-centered impulse to say something or to add my memories to the general consciousness.”
A new report released at the London Book Fair showed that fiction sales are growing in global book markets, while nonfiction sales are struggling, Publishers Weekly reports. According to an analysis of eighteen territories, sixteen markets showed significant revenue for fiction, whereas only six regions showed growth in nonfiction, and at mostly lower rates than fiction. The report also identified social media, and particularly BookTok, as a major engine behind romance and fantasy sales.
Robert Rubsam writes for the New York Times about how Netflix has been buying the rights to renowned novels from around the world. The streaming platform has spent hundreds of millions of dollars adapting novels such as Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko (2017), and Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem (2008). But Rubsam is unconvinced by the site and its apparently endless trove of accessible content. “It seems the aim, in Netflix’s world, is to put the text onscreen in a way that is maximally legible,” he writes, “with none of the experimentation that might allow an adaptation to become an autonomous work of art.”
Apple Original Films will develop Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead novels with Martin Scorsese writing, directing, and producing alongside filmmaker Todd Field, Publishers Weekly reports. Scorsese will start with Home (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), the second of four novels in the Gilead series, and Leonardo DiCaprio is set to star in the feature film.
For Poetry, Mia You writes about translating Korean poetry into English, the power of ambiguity when moving between languages, and the many ways “English is being used both communicatively and creatively by so many non-native speakers.” You wonders: “Who belongs to a language? To whom does a language belong?”
Netgalley is launching a consumer marketing platform called Booktrovert, Publishers Lunch reports. According to its press release, Booktrovert will help readers “celebrate their love of books by participating in digital giveaways, special promotions, and fun bookish activities.” Publishers, writers, and publicists will be able to start setting up book giveaways in early April. Netgalley has reorganized its staff in anticipation of the launch.
One day after the ACLU’s lawsuit, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) removed President Trump’s “gender ideology” requirements, which prohibited arts organizations from receiving funding for projects related to gender expression, the Wrap reports. The outcome of the case is still pending, but for now, organizations can apply for NEA funding without adhering to Trump’s previous stipulations.
Zando will acquire Tin House Books, Katy Hershberger reports for Publishers Lunch. The announcement states, “Zando plans to elevate the impact of Tin House’s existing, illustrious backlist, activating Zando’s own robust publishing infrastructure to enhance sales, marketing, and distribution efficiencies for Tin House titles.” Tin House founder Win McCormack will continue “his association with the list” as chair of Tin House and Tin House editorial director Masie Cochran will become an editorial leader at Zando. Hershberger writes: “The company plans to release new Tin House titles, retaining the publisher’s name, starting in 2026. Tin House’s workshops and podcast aren’t included in the acquisition, and will remain separate, though still with the Tin House moniker.”
Boris Kachka writes for the Atlantic about the role politics should play in fiction. “We don’t live in a time when politics can be cordoned off from art; it permeates the world,” he writes, “and a novel without much of it would be difficult to believe.”
Marc Weingarten writes for the Los Angeles Times about a new book by Alissa Wilkinson that explores Joan Didion’s open fascination with Hollywood and John Wayne, even though the author was otherwise famously reserved. Preoccupied with the line between mythmaking and truth-telling, Didion had a “creeping cynicism toward politics and its appropriation of movie style,” but didn’t lose “her ardor for film,” Weingarten writes.
Sally Kim, the president and publisher of Little, Brown (and a member of the board of directors of Poets & Writers), discusses the trajectory of her publishing career with the New York Times. Kim speaks to her experience as the first Asian American woman in her position within the Hachette Book Group: “Ten years ago,” she says, “they never would have hired someone like me for this position. Coming up in publishing, I had no one who looked like me, especially in editorial.” She adds, “I spent my early years trying to conform, to play by the rules,” but now, she says, “I realize I cannot extract my identity and my Asian Americanness.”
According to a new poll, 40 percent of British adults have not read or listened to a book in the past year, the Guardian reports. The data also showed reading habits split along gender, class, and political divides. Women read more than men, with 66 percent of women reporting they read at least one book in the past year compared with 53 percent of men. Sixty-six percent of middle-class respondents have read a book in the last year compared to 52 percent of working-class respondents. Compared to other political affiliations, Labour Party voters were most likely to have read a book in the past year. The median British adult has read or listened to three books in the past twelve months.
The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union has announced that more than two hundred Barnes & Noble employees at three New York City locations have approved their first union contracts, Publishers Weekly reports. The three-year agreements include wage increases, healthcare coverage, safety provisions, and layoff protections.
The American Civil Liberties Union is suing the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) for enforcing Trump’s anti-trans mandate, Hyperallergic reports. The lawsuit argues that the NEA’s new grant requirement violates the First Amendment and administrative procedure law. The suit represents four arts organizations—Rhode Island Latino Arts, the Theatre Communications Group and National Queer Theater in New York, and the Theater Offensive in Massachusetts.
On February 26, the International Writing Program (IWP) at the University of Iowa learned that its grants with the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, were being terminated. IWP released a statement today sharing that the “immediate result was the cancellation of Between the Lines (the IWP’s summer youth program), and the dissolution of Lines and Spaces Exchanges, Distance Learning courses, and Emerging Voices programs.” The statement continues: “We are devastated by the abrupt end of this 58-year partnership and are working closely with University of Iowa General Counsel and Grant Accounting to review the terminations, understand their full impact, and respond in the best interest of the organization.”
The March 2025 issue of Poetry, curated by guest editor Esther Belin, features work by Indigenous writers and is the first-ever issue of the magazine devoted to Diné language and poetics. Belin writes in her Editor’s Note: “Originally forced on us, English is now being reconstructed with Diné sound and thought.” Contributors include Sherwin Bitsui, Kinsale Drake, Elise Paschen, and Jake Skeets, among others.
Neil Gaiman has asked a U.S. district court to dismiss a civil lawsuit accusing him of rape and sexual assault filed by Scarlett Pavlovich, who used to work for the author, the Guardian reports. The motion argued that the case should be heard in New Zealand, where the alleged abuse took place. In an accompanying statement, Gaiman denied all allegations.
The book publishing industry is preparing for the impact of President Trump’s 25 percent tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada, and 10 percent increase to tariffs on goods from China, Publishers Weekly reports. While there is far less printing in Mexico and Canada than in China, the U.S. imported $1.82 billion of uncoated paper in 2023, with 67 percent of that paper coming from Canada. Printers and publishers in the U.S. disagree on whether domestic book manufacturers have the capacity to assume the production of books that are currently printed in China.
Reagan Arthur will launch Cardinal, an imprint at Grand Central Publishing, in the fall of 2025, Publishers Lunch reports. Cardinal plans to publish approximately six titles per year and aims to “entertain and enlighten, across genres and across borders.”
The longlist for the 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction has been announced, the Guardian reports. The list includes novels by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Miranda July, Elizabeth Strout, and Aria Aber, among others. A shortlist of six books will be announced on April 2. The winner will be revealed on June 12 and receive 30,000 pounds (approximately $38,610).
Book publishing industry sales increased 6.5 percent overall from 2023 to 2024, to $14.18 billion, Publishers Weekly reports. Adult fiction rose 12.6 percent and adult nonfiction rose 1.3 percent. In the adult fiction market, digital audio led with the highest sales jumping 31.2 percent.
The finalists for the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction have been announced, the Associated Press reports. The nominees include ’Pemi Aguda’s Ghostroots (Norton), Susan Muaddi Darraj’s Behind You Is the Sea (HarperVia), Percival Everett’s James (Doubleday), Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and Danzy Senna’s Colored Television (Riverhead Books). The winner will be announced in early April and receive $15,000.
Stories and essays by Harper Lee will appear for the first time in a new collection called The Land of Sweet Forever (Harper, October 2025), the New York Times reports. Before publishing To Kill a Mockingbird in 1960, Lee had written several short stories that explored some of the novel’s characters and themes. The forthcoming collection includes eight previously unreleased pieces of fiction and eight pieces of nonfiction that Lee published in various outlets between 1961 and 2006, including a profile of Truman Capote and a letter to Oprah Winfrey.
This spring Keisha Mennefee is launching Honey Blossom Press, a boutique imprint focused on underrepresented authors, Publishers Weekly reports. The imprint plans to publish twenty titles in its first year and will be distributed by Ingram, with audiobooks produced and distributed by RBmedia.
Amanda Fortini writes for T: The New York Times Style Magazine about why musicians, artists, and writers have been obsessed with the color blue. Inspired by Maggie Nelson’s book-length lyric essay Bluets (Wave Books, 2009), Fortini began reading the work of authors such as Joan Didion, William H. Gass, Rebecca Solnit, and Kate Braverman, who share a fascination with the color. “Not unlike the ocean—beautiful and tranquil one moment; stormy, choppy, even deadly the next—blue is metaphorically elastic,” Fortini writes, “one might even say capricious.” “No matter how many times you invoke the word,” she adds, “blue never loses its incantatory power.”
Deep Vellum Publishing will assume publishing, distribution, and marketing responsibilities for Open Letter Books, a nonprofit literary translation press founded in 2007 and housed at the University of Rochester, Publishers Weekly reports. Editorial direction will remain with Chad W. Post, the founder of Open Letters Books. With this latest partnership, Deep Vellum now encompasses six imprints: Dalkey Archive Press, Fum d’Estampa, Open Letter, Phoneme Media, La Reunion, and A Strange Object.
Lin-Manuel Miranda is among twenty-one new inductees into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Associated Press reports. Other new members include the New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik, novelist Chang-rae Lee, and author-translator Daniel Mendelsohn.
French president Emmanuel Macron has said he is concerned about the “arbitrary detention” of Boualem Sansal, the French Algerian author who recently began a hunger strike over his imprisonment in Algeria, the Guardian reports. In November 2024 Sansal was arrested, prompting a letter calling for his release, which was signed by renowned authors such as Salman Rushdie, Annie Ernaux, and Wole Soyinka. PEN America released a statement on Tuesday calling for the immediate release of the author, adding that, “his hunger strike adds to grave concerns for his wellbeing.”
Princeton University Library will mark the centenary of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby with a range of programs and events at the Princeton Public Library, Lewis Center for the Arts, Labyrinth Books, and other venues, Fine Books & Collections reports.
A new report from PEN America provides a thorough analysis of the 4,128 unique titles that the organization found were removed from public schools during the 2023–2024 school year, Publishers Weekly reports. The study determined that 36 percent of the banned books feature characters or people of color and 25 percent include LGBTQ+ people or characters.
The National Coalition Against Censorship released a statement expressing “outrage at the Trump Administration’s recent efforts to establish ideological control over federally-funded cultural initiatives in the United States.” The statement, which is signed by the Authors Guild, the Dramatists Guild of America, and PEN America, among others, goes on to say: “In the face of these blatant efforts to subject the arts to ideological conformity, our nation’s cultural leaders—the curators, librarians, directors of cultural spaces, museum trustees, artists, theater directors, authors, or publishers—are now left to uphold the founding American values of freedom of expression.”
At its Winter Institute in Denver, the American Booksellers Association (ABA) created space to discuss the future of independent bookselling amidst the Trump administration’s attacks on DEI and dismissal of book bans as a “hoax,” Publishers Weekly reports. Allison Hill, the CEO of ABA, emphasized the organization’s support for DEI initiatives and the freedom to read: “Great books are written by everyone, and they should be available to everyone,” she said.
President Trump has threatened lawsuits against authors and publishers who have cited anonymous sources in books about him and his allies, the Hill reports. In a statement, Jonathan Friedman, the Sy Syms managing director for U.S. Free Expression Programs at PEN America, said, “The freedom of citizens to criticize their government without fear of reprisal—including anonymously—is an elemental First Amendment freedom, which is exactly why the President is threatening to go after it. This is part of this administration’s assault on free expression intended to demand ideological capitulation and conformity.”
An interdisciplinary exhibition examining the history, craft, and impact of children’s literature is open until August 17 at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin, Fine Books & Collections reports. The show features work created by Gabriel García Márquez, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Jayne Anne Phillips, among others, in their youth. Other highlights include magic lantern slides illustrating Aesop’s Fables and illustrations from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince.
Rare book collector Rebecca Romney wrote a book called Jane Austen’s Bookshelf, published this month by S&S / Marysue Rucci Books, to draw attention to eight women authors—including Charlotte Lennox, Hannah More, and Maria Edgeworth—who shaped Austen’s literary world, NPR reports.
Shannon Ives writes for Electric Literature about eight contemporary queer retellings of classic myths and fairy tales. The list includes The Song of Achilles (Ecco, 2012), which is based on The Iliad and written by Madeline Miller; A Sweet Sting of Salt (Dell, 2024) by Rose Sutherland, which offers a “sapphic retelling of selkie folklore”; and Malice (Del Rey, 2022) by Heather Walter, which reimagines Maleficent as Aurora’s love interest.
Twelve of the thirteen books nominated for this year’s International Booker Prize are under two hundred pages long, the New York Times reports. Max Porter, the chair of this year’s judging panel, said the length of the books selected does not represent a “much-prophesied loss of attention span,” and underscored that mastering a short novel is equally difficult to writing a long one. “Some of these books don’t have a wasted word,” he added.
Iowa House Representative Helena Hayes, whose bill to criminalize librarians has advanced quickly through the legislature and inspired a copycat bill in the Senate, has brought another bill to the House this week that would cut off certain state funds to libraries if they pay dues to the American Library Association (ALA) or the Iowa Library Association, Book Riot reports. Hayes is proposing the bill because she claims the ALA, which condemns censorship, opposes content ratings placed on books in libraries.
The Authors Guild is encouraging those who have applied for grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and those who have already received NEA funding to “hold tight,” Publishers Lunch reports, since President Trump’s executive orders regarding the termination of programs promoting DEI or “gender ideology” are “likely unenforceable.” Mary Rasenberger, the president of the Authors Guild, says, “There is really clear Supreme Court precedent” that the DEI executive order as implemented by the NEA “is unconstitutional.”
All thirteen writers longlisted for this year’s International Booker Prize are first-time nominees, the Guardian reports. The prize for the best book translated into English is 50,000 pounds (approximately $63,320) and will be shared equally between the winning author and translator. The shortlist of six titles will be announced on April 8, and the winner will be celebrated at a ceremony in London on May 20.
After President Trump put in new leadership at the National Archives, the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library in Atlanta canceled events with authors who wrote books about the civil rights movement, climate change, and homelessness, the New York Times reports. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) released a statement that said, “Programs and events must always advance and uphold NARA’s core mission: to preserve the records of the United States and make them available to the public. On this issue, leadership at the Carter Presidential Library is empowered to make their own decisions about scheduling events and programs.”
Hoopla, a service that provides public libraries e-books, announced it will do more to inhibit the dissemination of low-quality, AI-generated books, which were common on its platform, 404 Media reports. Jennie Rose Halperin, the executive director of Library Futures, an organization for librarians, remains disappointed in hoopla for evading accountability: “Librarians select, purchase, and lend materials in service to the public, and they put their trust in hoopla to provide a curated and high-quality catalog of materials,” she says. “Hoopla has broken this trust in favor of a profit-motivated, exploitative model that flies in the face of professional values.”
The 2025 London Book Fair, which will run from March 11 to March 13, will focus on AI and youth reading initiatives, Publishers Weekly reports. The fair is expecting more than thirty thousand attendees.
