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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.
British novelists Richard Osman and Kate Mosse criticized the UK government over its plan to give artificial intelligence companies the freedom to mine artistic works for data, the Guardian reports. Mosse maintained that responsible use of AI “cannot be at the expense of the creative industries.” Osman agreed: “If you want to use a copyrighted work, you ask permission, and then you pay for it. Anything else is theft,” he said.
The literary community in Los Angeles has been banding together amidst ongoing wildfires, Publishers Weekly reports. Schools, homes, and businesses have been destroyed as have literary archives, such as the personal library of the late artist Gary Indiana. But literary institutions have been sharing timely information on social media and offering mutual aid. Penguin Random House announced to its employees that it will make “unlimited matching donations” benefiting first responders and other residents in need. Local bookstores have served as spaces where people can gather and distribute necessary supplies. The Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) announced that it has made “an immediate and meaningful” donation to the California Community Foundation, a nonprofit providing support to marginalized communities impacted by wildfires. The annual AWP conference is still set to take place in L.A. from March 27-29, but in a statement, AWP said that it “remains in active conversation with” its partner organizations “to make thoughtful and sensitive decisions that are in the best interest of the city and people of Los Angeles.”
Neil Gaiman denies allegations of sexual abuse and assault made by multiple women and reported in New York magazine this week, the New York Times reports. In a statement posted to his website, Gaiman denies engaging in “nonconsensual sexual activity with anyone,” and claims that he has avoided commenting sooner to avoid bringing attention to “a lot of misinformation.”
Publishers Weekly reports that the online literary magazine Joyland has relaunched as Joyland Publishing. The independent nonprofit publisher of fiction is now comprised of Joyland and Joyland Editions, a small press that plans to release two novellas annually with distribution through Asterism.
Following Bookshop.org’s offer last week to match up to $10,000 in donations to support booksellers affected by the wildfires in Southern California, Forefront Books, Ingram Content Group, Macmillan Publishers, Dav Pilkey, and Mad Cave Studios are matching up to $45,000 in donations to the Book Industry Charitable Foundation (Binc).
Susie Alegre, the author of Human Rights, Robot Wrongs: Being Human in the Age of AI, says that 2025 will mark a shift in the public perception of the value of AI and that there will be “a renewed appreciation of the emotional, spiritual, political, cultural, and ultimately financial value of high-quality human writing.” This year, Alegre writes for Wired, “humans will reassert their worth.”
Peter Gizzi won the T. S. Eliot Prize for his poetry collection Fierce Elegy, the Guardian reports. The prize of £25,000 (approximately $30,385) is given annually for the best new poetry collection published in the UK or Ireland. Fierce Elegy, which draws on the poet’s experience of losing his brother, was published in the U.S. by Wesleyan University Press in 2023 and in the UK by Penguin in 2024.
New York magazine has published an extensive report on the allegations of sexual assault, coercion, and abuse against best-selling fantasy author Neil Gaiman that were first made public last summer by a British podcast, Master. Since then, more women have shared allegations, and New York magazine features editor Lila Shapiro talked to four of them, including Scarlett Pavlovich, former babysitter to Gaiman’s son with performer and author Amanda Palmer. Gaiman, who declined to speak with Shapiro, has said that the relationships, including with Pavlovich, were consensual.
Print book sales increased by less than 1 percent in 2024, the first annual increase in three years, according to Publishers Weekly. The best-selling book of the year, with nearly 1.5 million copies sold, was The Women by Kristin Hannah.
Among the many structures consumed by the wildfires in Southern California is the 1907 Zane Grey Estate, “the Mediterranean-style residence of one of California’s great Western novelists,” the New York Times reports.
Colm Tóibín writes about his experiences near the fires in Los Angeles for the London Review of Books, including the news that the personal library of Gary Indiana, the novelist, cultural critic and playwright who died in October, was destroyed by the Eaton fire. The author’s belongings had arrived on Tuesday at a private residence in Altadena from New York City, where he died. The fire consumed the home the next day.
Kaya Press, the Los Angeles–based publisher of books of the Asian Pacific diaspora, is the winner of the 2024 Constellation Award, a $10,000 prize sponsored by the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses. The judges for this year’s award were CLMP board members Beena Kamlani, author and freelance editor; Deborah Paredez, author, cofounder of CantoMundo, and associate professor at Columbia University; and Clarence Reynolds, former director of literary programs at the Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College CUNY. For more about Kaya Press, read Small Press Points.
Boris Kachka acknowledges the list of novels, movies, songs, and other works whose copyright protection expired on New Year’s Day, or, as the Books department of the Atlantic celebrates January 1, Public Domain Day. “This year heralds the liberation in the United States of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, the song ‘Singin’ in the Rain,’ the earliest versions of Popeye and Tintin, and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.”
The New York Public Library has acquired the archive of author Jhumpa Lahiri, Library Journal reports. “Comprising 31 boxes of material stretching to nearly 40 linear feet, the archive, which will become publicly available in 2025, chronicles Lahiri’s literary accomplishments from a young age and her commitment to critical reading, the nuances of language, and the craft of writing.”
According to newly released documents in a California class-action lawsuit against Meta, CEO Mark Zuckerberg knew that the books used to train the company’s AI tool were pirated, reports Katy Hershberger of Publishers Lunch.
Simon & Schuster has launched a new audio imprint, Simon Maverick, featuring content from self-published authors, according to Publishers Weekly. Led by Jason Pinter, former publisher of Polis Books, the imprint aims to publish more than fifty titles in 2025, and will be “dedicated to shining a light on works from talented, diverse, and emerging independent authors.”
To support booksellers affected by the wildfires in Southern California, Bookshop.org is matching up to $10,000 in donations to the Book Industry Charitable Foundation, reports Shelf Awareness.
Publishers Weekly reports on bookstores and publishers that have been closed or evacuated due to the ongoing fires, power outages, and severe weather in the Los Angeles metro area. Among the bookstores affected are Vroman’s and Octavia’s Bookshelf in Pasadena, Book Soup in West Hollywood, and Zibby’s Bookshop in Santa Monica.
Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, has launched a new imprint devoted to elevating Black voices. Storehouse Voices “will issue books across a broad range of nonfiction categories and fiction genres, promoting the richness of Black storytelling through intentional acquisitions and hiring efforts, strategic partnerships, and authentic, equity-minded community outreach,” according to Crown’s press release. “Founded with a mission of bridging the representation gap of authors of color in the publishing industry, Storehouse Voices is informed by a deep understanding of the unique cultural and historical contexts of the Black experience in America and committed to ensuring that literary works by underrepresented authors are presented authentically, respectfully, and powerfully across the publishing and media landscape.”
Two literary agencies, Park & Fine Literary and Media and Brower Literary & Management, have merged to form Park, Fine & Brower Literary Management, Publishers Weekly reports. “The new agency represents more than 300 authors of all genres and in all stages of their careers, with Park & Fine cofounder Celeste Fine and Brower founder Kimberly Brower serving as co-CEOs.”
Adriana Gallardo of NPR’s Morning Edition tells the story of how the unfinished manuscript of Zora Neale Hurston’s final novel, The Life of Herod the Great, out now from Amistad, was nearly consumed by fire after the author’s death in 1960. “Lucky for readers of Hurston, a neighbor and friend of the writer intervened with a hose, saving hundreds of pages that ended up in the hands of Deborah G. Plant, a scholar specializing in the life and works of Hurston.” For more about Hurston’s final novel, read “A New Hurston’s ‘Incomplete’ Truths” by Destiny O. Birdsong.
Jenna Bush Hager, who in 2019 joined the ranks of celebrity book club hosts like Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, and Emma Roberts when she launched Read With Jenna on the Today show, is starting her own publishing venture with Penguin Random House, the New York Times reports. Thousand Voices x RHPG will publish four to six books a year across genres, including literary fiction, memoir, historical fiction, and romance, at various imprints within Random House.
Tracy Wolff, author of the Crave series of romantasy (romance plus fantasy) books, is being sued for copyright infringement by Lynne Freeman, who alleges that Wolff’s novel Crave shares significant plot points with her own unpublished novel, “Blue Moon Rising,” which Freeman had submitted to Entangled, the press that later published Crave, after Freeman withdrew her submission. Katy Waldman of the New Yorker explains how romantasy’s “reliance on standardized tropes makes proving plot theft tricky.”
Both the director and chair of London’s Royal Society of Literature (RSL), “a learned society founded in 1820 by King George IV to ‘reward literary merit and excite literary talent,’” are stepping down from their posts ahead of the results of the society’s first ever governance review, conducted by the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, according to the Guardian. Last year the RSL was “widely criticised for alleged censorship, changes to the way it elects fellows, and not taking a strong enough stance in response to the stabbing of Salman Rushdie.”
For writers who may find the blank pages of that brand new notebook intimidating, some seasoned journal-keepers, including novelist Maggie Shipstead, share advice with T: The New York Times Style Magazine for how to start and keep a journal.
The Dallas-based literary arts nonprofit and publishing house Deep Vellum has acquired the British small press Fum d’Estampa Press, which has published thirty titles of literature in translation, including poetry, fiction, nonfiction, since it was founded in 2020, Publishers Weekly reports. Deep Vellum publisher Will Evans calls it a “perfect alignment of missions to champion global voices.”
Barnes & Noble plans to add sixty new locations in 2025, according to Michael Cader of Publishers Lunch, which would put the total number of B&N locations at around 700 by the end of the year.
Fable, a popular app for talking about and tracking books, is changing the way it creates personalized summaries for its users after complaints that an AI model used offensive language, Christine Hauser reports for the New York Times.
Carter Sherman of the Guardian writes about the political dimensions of the increasingly popular romance genre, citing those in the romance community, sometimes referred to as “romancelandia,” who have rallied voters and resisted book bans through podcasts and phone banks.
An exhibition of rare items connected to Charles Dickens will open in February and be on display until the end of June at the museum dedicated to his life and work in London, the BBC reports. The new show includes “a blubber-stained copy” of David Copperfield (1850) brought to Antarctica by Captain Scott’s 1910–1912 Terra Nova expedition, preliminary illustrations for the first publication of A Christmas Carol (1843), personal effects, photographs, and other treasures. The exhibition marks one hundred years since the establishment of the Charles Dickens Museum, which is located in the property where Dickens lived from 1837 to 1839.
Bethanne Patrick writes for the Washington Post about V. V. Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night (Random House, 2023) and how the novel illuminates the experiences of civilian women during the decades-long civil war in Sri Lanka. Ganeshananthan says she wanted “to put those women at the center…. Students, dissidents, health-care workers, people living in proximity to those bearing arms, people displaced from their homes, all of that.” She adds, “my novel is in part about a woman’s mind and consciousness. I’m thrilled to get the opportunity to go beyond why that’s a worthy topic and delve into what she thinks, the very real and varied kinds of labor she undertakes in a world that would try to give her less agency than she would seize for herself.” Brotherless Night has received multiple awards including the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction and Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2024, and the Asian Prize for Fiction in 2023.
NPR reports on the most-borrowed books from public libraries in 2024. The list includes Kristin Hannah’s The Women (St. Martin’s Press, 2024), Rebecca Yarros’s Fourth Wing (Red Tower Books, 2023), and Emily Henry’s Happy Place (Berkley, 2023). The most checked-out adult book in New York City was Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (Knopf, 2022) by Gabrielle Zevin.
The Louisiana Supreme Court ruled that Amanda Jones’s 2022 defamation case against two men who accused her of promoting pornography to children can continue, Publishers Weekly reports. Jones, a school librarian, spoke up against proposed book bans and the censorship of books about LGBTQ people and people of color. After the men claimed she was advocating to make pornography accessible to children and grooming them, she filed a defamation lawsuit. After multiple dismissals and denied appeals, the Louisiana Supreme Court ordered the appeals court to hear the case on the merits. One of the justices filed a concurrence, stating, “The burden will be on defendants to prove that plaintiff did in fact do the acts they have publicly accused her of.” Jones is not seeking significant damages—just $1 and an apology. “We teach our children to report and speak out against bullying, and that is what I am doing,” she said.
The recently restored Notre-Dame cathedral is displaying its library of medieval manuscripts, prints, and books at the Musée de Cluny in Paris until March 16, 2025, Fine Books & Collections reports. The collection features theology texts, church history, canon and civil law, biblical and liturgical books, as well as the works of classic authors.
Emily Eakin writes for the New York Times about the “plagiarism plot” in contemporary literature. Referencing works such as Yellowface (William Morrow, 2023) by R. F. Kuang, A Lonely Man (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021) by Chris Power, and Colored Television (Riverhead Books, 2024) by Danzy Senna, among others, Eakin writes, “it would be possible to assemble an entire library of diverting and accomplished contemporary work fixated on literary imitation, appropriation, and theft.” While she understands the “anxiety of influence” for writers of fiction as a “hazard of the trade,” Eakin argues that the presence of these stories has oversaturated the literary landscape.
The Charles Dickens Museum has announced that Frankie Kubicki, its current deputy director, will become director of the museum in March 2025, Fine Books & Collections reports. “I am truly delighted and honored to be stepping into this new role and to be able to help to shape the future of this special place,” Kubicki said, adding, “Charles Dickens is as compelling as he ever has been and the issues and themes that absorbed him remain strikingly relevant.” 2025 marks the centennial of the museum at 48 Doughty Street, Holborn, the only remaining London house in which Dickens lived.
The BBC has compiled a list of the twenty-four best books of 2024. The list includes Martyr! (Knopf) by Kaveh Akbar, Small Rain (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Garth Greenwell, and All Fours (Riverhead Books) by Miranda July, among other titles. (Read “The Triumph of a Heart: A Profile of Garth Greenwell” in the September/October 2024 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine).
Alexandra Alter writes for the New York Times about intricately designed books with decorated borders and other artistic effects—a trend that started in romance and fantasy but has now spread throughout the publishing industry. “Publishers are investing in colorful patterned edges, metallic foil covers, reversible jackets, elaborate artwork on the endpapers, ribbon bookmarks and bonus content,” Alter writes. “Deluxe editions have also proliferated because of TikTok, which has reshaped book publishing and marketing strategies,” especially when appealing to younger audiences.
Freedom to Read activists celebrate a major legal victory in Arkansas in the fight against book bans, Publishers Weekly reports. Timothy Brooks, a federal judge in Arkansas, found the polarizing “harmful to minors law,” which aims “to protect younger minors from accessing inappropriate sexual content in libraries and bookstores” unconstitutional. Brooks added that the law “will only achieve that end at the expense of everyone else’s First Amendment rights” and that the law “deputizes librarians and booksellers as the agents of censorship.”
In an interview with the Creative Independent, writer and literary agent Jaclyn Gilbert discusses resisting the pressures of the market while honoring nuance and offering feedback. In 2021 Gilbert founded Driftless Literary, an agenting collective dedicated to supporting authors as they develop experimental and genre-bending work. “Driftless began as an experiment for creating a process-driven space for empowering authors to stay true to their vision in ways the traditional market hasn’t yet made space for,” Gilbert says, adding that her goal when providing feedback “is for it to be always generative.” In considering how polarized the political climate is today, she wonders, “why can’t we allow multiple points of view to coexist in a given work, just as we allow paradoxical dualities to coexist in our human condition as we navigate our mortality, grief, and loss?”
Poet Michael Palma published a translation of The Divine Comedy (Liveright) this month that includes several changes to his 2002 translation of Dante’s Inferno (Norton), NPR reports. In the new translation, Palma retains the terza rima rhyme scheme Dante invented: The first and third lines of each stanza rhyme, and the second line sets up the rhyme scheme in the following tercet. Palma says that without reproducing the rhyme scheme, “You’re losing the music of the poem.”
Lily Meyer writes for the Atlantic about how recent books on parenting offer divergent views on fatherhood. Meyer notes that most books explore the father-son relationship from the perspective of the son, citing authors such as John Updike, Philip Roth, Richard Ford, Junot Díaz, and others. However, Meyer focuses her essay on books by two contemporary male authors who underscore their transformations into fathers: I Will Do Better: A Father’s Memoir of Heartbreak, Parenting, and Love (Abrams Press, 2024) by Charles Bock, and Childish Literature (Penguin Books, 2024), by Alejandro Zambra. Meyer writes about “the philosophical distinction between Childish Literature and I Will Do Better: The former is exterior, the latter interior.”
Literary agent Richard Curtis has chronicled the state of publishing in Hudibrastic verse for nearly forty years, and to honor the end of this tradition, Publishers Weekly has compiled all the installments published in the magazine over the years. Among his many influential poems, Curtis published a prescient installment in 2007 that observed publishers turning their authors into “brands” and his last poem to close out 2024 shares insights about the rise of book bans and generative AI.
Bloom, a romance publisher that was founded in 2021, landed twenty-five books on the best-seller list this year, the New York Times reports. E. L. James, the author of the Fifty Shades of Grey series, was the first writer to join the press, which helped Bloom solidify its brand and attract submissions. The press took on self-published authors who already had an online fan base and helped them distribute their books, becoming the fastest-growing imprint in romance.
