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A new organization known as McCormack Writing Center will house the programs formerly known as Tin House Workshop, the organization announced on its website today. Founded in 2003 as a summer writers workshop and operated alongside the literary magazine Tin House and Tin House Books, the workshop expanded its programming to craft intensives, online classes, and residencies in subsequent years. The transition to the McCormack Writing Center follows the acquisition of the organization’s book publishing arm by Zando in 2025. Tin House Workshop lead staff Lance Cleland and A.L. Major will stay on through the transition, serving as executive director and director of programs respectively.

A partnership between One World and Little Free Library will place book-sharing boxes in twelve communities across the United States, each box stocked with titles that “help readers understand and shape our changing world,” Publishers Weekly reports. Books from the One World Essentials line—including Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong, and The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio—will be distributed in custom book-sharing boxes that honor a given title. Each will placed in a neighborhood with a connection to the author or the book. “The books in this series are not just about thinking, but rethinking, not just observing, but getting close, not just catharsis but movement to action,” says Chris Jackson, One World publisher and editor in chief. “Most of all, they’re meant to be freely read and shared—and we’re excited to get them to more readers through this exciting partnership with Little Free Library.”

Hachette Book Group (HBG) and Cengage are joining the copyright lawsuit against Google, reports Publishers Lunch. This class action suit was initiated by writers and illustrators in 2023, accusing the tech behemoth of copyright infringement in using their books to train Gemini, Google’s AI system. HBG and Cengage will represent the interests of publishers, a previously unrepresented class of rightsholders in the suit. The motion states, “They wish to stand alongside their authors in vindicating copyright owners’ rights” as “[p]ublishers are significant stakeholders in this case, with a parallel but distinct set of interests and arguments to make at a historic trial.”

Wiley has announced the appointment of its first chief of AI and data services officer, Publishers Weekly reports. In the new role, Armughan Rafat will focus on “developing and commercializing AI-ready content and data products for AI developers and corporate R&D teams.” The position has been created to “accelerate Wiley’s effort to license its content to AI developers as well as companies building out their AI applications.” Since January 2024, Wiley has generated nearly $100 million in revenue from AI licensing, including deals with Anthropic, the AI corporation sued in a class-action lawsuit brought by writers for copyright infringement.

Five writers are included in the 2026 class of USA Fellows, announced today by the Chicago-based arts funding organization United States Artists. Poets Sarah Aziza and LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, nonfiction writer Mayuk Sen, sequential artist Lauren Rebecca Weinstein, and multigenre writer and artist Johanna Hedva will each receive unrestricted $50,000 cash awards, “granting recipients the freedom to allocate funds to their unique needs.” Fifty artists from twenty-one states comprise this year’s class of fellows, with grants made in ten creative disciplines. Nominations for the fellowships come from an anonymous, rotating group of arts professionals, with finalists identified by panels of experts in each discipline. The 2026 class of fellows marks “two decades of unrestricted support that nurtures artists’ creative freedom and drives lasting impact” as the program hits its twentieth anniversary year.

Bestselling author Colleen Hoover has revealed in an Instagram story that she recently received a cancer diagnosis, USA Today reports. The author of It Ends With Us (Atria Books, 2016) and Verity (Grand Central Publishing, 2021) noted her “second to last day of radiation” at a Texas Oncology location and added that the unspecified type of cancer had been “removed.”

Adelaide Writers’ Week, one of Australia’s biggest cultural festivals, has been cancelled in the backlash following the removal of Australian Palestinian author Randa Abdel-Fattah from the event’s lineup, the Guardian reports. The board of the festival said last week that Abdel-Fattah, “a vocal critic of Israel,” had been disinvited due to “insensitivities” following the mass shooting at a Jewish festival at Bondi Beach last month. After word of the author’s removal spread, 180 other writers scheduled to appear withdrew from the festival, including former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and British author Zadie Smith. All but one member of the board have now resigned, including the director who had invited Abdel-Fattah. 

For the second year in a row, print book sales were up, reports Publishers Weekly. Based on data compiled by Circana BookScan, there was a .3 percent increase in print book sales from 2024 to 2025, with 762.4 million books being bought last year. Sales peaked in 2021 at 839.7 million copies, though they’re now at higher levels than they were before the pandemic. Postpandemic, adult fiction has taken the sales lead. Graphic novels and romance books had a 9.2 percent and 3.9 percent increase, respectively, while fantasy book sales fell by 8.7 percent. Publishers hoped for higher numbers for 2025. 

A press release from Folio Literary Management has announced the agency’s acquisition of the Greenhouse Literary Agency from Coolabi Group. Folio describes the move as “expanding Folio’s children’s division and reinforcing its commitment to representing exceptional children’s book authors and illustrators.” Greenhouse’s full backlist and client list will transfer to Folio, as will current Greenhouse staff. “We are thrilled to be moving from strength to strength and look forward with excitement to what the future holds for our clients’ careers at Folio Jr,.” says Chelsea Eberly, who will join Folio as vice president, transitioning from her role as director at Greenhouse.

A new deadline has been set for writers to opt-out or make objections in the lawsuit being brought against AI corporation Anthropic, Publishers Lunch reports. Judge Araceli Martinez-Oluguin has extended the deadline from January 7 to the revised deadline of January 29, allowing writers more time to exclude themselves from the class-action case and pursue different legal recourse. “This is the only option that allows you to bring your own separate lawsuit against Anthropic for the claims this Settlement resolves.”

The woman fatally shot by an ICE officer in Minneapolis yesterday has been identified as prize-winning poet Renee Nicole Good, the BBC reports. A mother of three, Good studied creative writing at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, and won a prize from the Academy of American Poets for her poem “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs” in 2020. Old Dominion University’s president, Brian Hemphill, wrote, “May Renee’s life be a reminder of what unites us: freedom, love, and peace.”

With book distributor Baker & Taylor set for “imminent closure,” NPR considers the consequences for libraries nationwide. “For nearly two hundred years, Baker & Taylor has played a key role in getting books from manufacturers to warehouses to library patrons’ hands. Partnering with more than 5,000 U.S. libraries, the company has been a staple in the industry, selling books at wholesale prices and providing them with labels and lamination so libraries don’t have to.” Librarians report lags of weeks or months in receiving new titles as Baker & Taylor concludes its services and their libraries set up new accounts with other distributors.

On behalf of the Kurt Vonnegurt Estate and together with the ACLU, three authors and two anonymous high school students are challenging provisions of Utah House Bill 29, the 2024 law that prohibits materials deemed “pornographic or indecent” from public schools, Publishers Weekly reports. Jason M. Groth, legal director for ACLU of Utah, sees the ban as particularly insidious for the way it sets up a single ban to trigger a snowballing effect: “Just three school districts can trigger a statewide ban, ensuring more authors and more books are swept up. We are moving forward now with a strong case to protect the First Amendment rights of an impressive group of authors and students.”

Publishers Weekly reports on supply-chain disruptions that have marred what was otherwise a strong holiday sales season at independent bookstores across the country. Many booksellers expressed frustration over “unexpected shipping delays of two weeks and more on shipments from Ingram, the Big Five, and other major publishers throughout December.” 

Harlequin France, a division of HarperCollins, has started implementing AI translation tools, reports Literary Hub. According to a letter published on the French Literary Translators Association’s website in December, the publisher has contacted their translators to inform them that their contracts will be ending ASAP. Instead, Harlequin has employed Fluent Planet, a communications agency using machine translation software. A spokesperson from Fluent Planet stated that their hybrid model joins “in-house language assistance tools with systematic human translation carried out by professional literary translators,” such that “freelance proofreaders” will review the results of the machine translations.  

The American Library Association recently announced that a division of their organization, the Public Library Association (PLA), has launched the Transformative Technology Task Force “to advise...on the evolving role and impacts of transformative technology on library work and to identify and recommend priority training topics relevant to public library staff and users.” More specifically, the task force, which began work in November of last year, will be focusing on artificial intelligence for the first two years. PLA President Dr. Brandy McNeil remarks that the association “has assembled a powerhouse group to help shape how public libraries approach innovation, ethics, and the opportunities of an AI-powered world.” The task force consists of nine PLA members. 

Earlier this week six authors filed new individual copyright infringement actions against Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, xAI, and Perplexity AI, Publishers Weekly reports. “The suits, which were filed in the Northern District of California, states the companies copied authors' books from well-known pirate libraries—including LibGen, Z-Library, and OceanofPDF—to train their large language models without permission, licensing, or compensation.” The six authors, including two-time Pulitzer Prize winner John Carreyrou, opted out of the $1.5 billion settlement of the lawsuit against Anthropic. “The new filing states that the settlement, which would provide $3,000 to authors and/or publishers, is not enough.” Instead, the plaintiffs are seeking $150,000 in statutory damages for each work against each defendant, or a total of $900,000 per work.

Barnes & Noble plans to open sixty new locations across the United States in 2026, USA Today reports. “While the details are still ‘being worked out’ as far as locations and grand opening dates, the expansion follows a period of ‘strong sales’ in existing stores, Barnes & Noble confirmed.”