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The winners of the annual Publishing Triangle Awards, which celebrate LGBTQ+ literary excellence, were announced at the New School Thursday. The list of winners includes Blas Falconer, who won the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry for Rara Avis (Four Way Books) and Cass Donish, who won the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry for Your Dazzling Death (Knopf). Jiaming Tang won both the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ+ Fiction and the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction for Cinema Love (Dutton).

Three hundred people in Chelsea, Michigan, formed a human chain to move thousands of books from the old location of Serendipity Books to its new site, the Washington Post reports. Bookstore owner Michelle Tuplin said she had the idea to create a “book brigade,” but did not expect so many community members to show up. The group relocated 9,100 books in under two hours and a video of the event has been viewed more than 1.6 million times on TikTok. The new Serendipity Books will open on April 26, which is also Independent Bookstore Day.

Alexandra Alter writes for the New York Times about the ethical quandaries of publishing Joan Didion’s journal entries about therapy, as they appear are in Notes to John, forthcoming from Knopf on April 22. The posthumous work collects journal entries she wrote after sessions with a psychiatrist, during which she discussed subjects such as alcoholism, adoption, depression, anxiety, guilt, and her complex relationship with her daughter, Quintana. The notes are sometimes addressed only to her husband, John Gregory Dunne, another factor that has sparked some fans and friends of Didion to wonder if the publication is invasive. “Didion was famously guarded,” Alter writes, but she was also “a meticulous note taker and record keeper who was savvy about the publishing industry; she likely knew that any literary documents she left behind could be released.”

DOGE has taken over the federal grants website, Grants.gov, the NonProfit Times reports. DOGE staffers will now be able to review grant proposals and make decisions about distributing funds, according to the Washington Post.

Keziah Weir writes for Vanity Fair about how Meta AI staffers concluded that more than seven million books have no “economic value.” Meta, which used millions of pirated books to train its AI, is arguing that the company’s use of copyrighted materials falls under the legal doctrine of “fair use.” The Association of American Publishers has rejected this claim, stating in an amicus brief filed last week, “There is nothing transformative about the systematic copying and encoding of textual works, word by word, into an LLM. It does not involve criticism or commentary, provision of a search or indexing utility, software interoperability, or any other purpose recognized as transformative under fair use precedents.” Meta also claimed that the company does not see the point in compensating authors to license their books because “for there to be a market, there must be something of value to exchange, but none of Plaintiffs works has economic value, individually, as training data.”

With the off Broadway debut of his 1958 play The Swamp Dwellers, Wole Soyinka, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, reflects on his younger, more optimistic self in the New York Times. Now ninety years old, Soyinka revisits The Swamp Dwellers, which he wrote when he was twenty-four, two years before Nigeria’s independence. “That play now makes me recollect very vividly that eve of independence season when we were all gung-ho about the emergence of a unified society,” he says, adding, “I’ve lost that sense of achievable idealism.” But, he continues, “One never loses a picture, a projection of what you think your society can be. That’s what hurts.”

Seven Stories Press has acquired Two Dollar Radio, Publishers Weekly reports. Two Dollar Radio, which is based in Columbus, Ohio, has approximately eighty titles in print, and is the fourth imprint of Seven Stories, which is based in New York City. Dan Simon, the publisher of Seven Stories, said both presses “are kind of alternative in the best sense: We’re not part of the club.” Eric Obenauf will remain in his role as publisher and editorial director of Two Dollar Radio.

McNally Jackson will host a biannual book festival at its Seaport location in New York City, Publishers Lunch reports. The first festival will take place this spring from May 7 through June with the theme “archives, historiography, and legacies.” McNally Jackson founder and owner Sarah McNally says she hopes the festival will offer “more access to high-level intellectual conversations in the city” and extend publicity for books beyond the few weeks around a title’s publication. This spring’s festival will feature Parul Sehgal and Andrea Long Chu; Lincoln Michel, Helen Phillips, Chloe Cooper Jones, and Kevin Nguyen.

The Hurston/Wright Foundation is celebrating its thirty-fifth anniversary by rebranding its annual Legacy Awards as the Zora Awards, People reports. The new name of the award will also come with a larger cash prize of $20,000. The Zora Award for debut fiction celebrates gifted Black authors at the beginning of their careers. The finalists for the 2025 prize will be announced in August.

The Mississippi Library Commission, which offers specialized research assistance to libraries in the state, has ordered the deletion of two research collections: the race relations database and the gender studies database, the Guardian reports. “The collections were stored in what’s called the Magnolia database, which is used by publicly funded schools, libraries, universities, and state agencies in Mississippi.” The commission’s executive director, Hulen Bivins, confirmed that the deletions were in response to the Trump administration’s recent actions against the Institute of Library and Museum Services. “We may lose a lot of materials,” Bivins told the Guardian.

Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Andrea Long Chu, author of the new essay collection Authority (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), talks with Brittany Luse of NPR’s It’s Been a Minute about “what kind of authority critics have, and why we might need to rethink what criticism should do for us.”

At a ceremony in New York City last night the Whiting Foundation announced the ten winners of the 2025 Whiting Awards. The $50,000 prizes are designed “to recognize excellence and promise in a spectrum of emerging talent, giving most winners the chance to devote themselves full time to their own writing, or to take bold new risks in their work.” The winners in poetry are Karisma Price and Annie Wenstrup; the winners in fiction are Elwin Cotman, Emil Ferris, Samuel Kọ́láwọlé, Claire Luchette, and Shubha Sunder; the winners in nonfiction are Aisha Sabatini Sloan and Sofi Thanhauser; and the winner in drama is Liza Birkenmeier. “These writers demonstrate astounding range; each has invented the tools they needed to carve out their narratives and worlds,” said Courtney Hodell, Whiting’s Director of Literary Programs. “Taken as a whole, their work shows a sharply honed sensitivity to our history, both individual and collective, and a passionate curiosity as to where a deeper understanding of that history can take us.” The Whiting Awards, established in 1985 by the Whiting Foundation, remain one of the most esteemed and largest monetary gifts for emerging writers.

A new Thomas Pynchon novel, Shadow Ticket, will be published later this year, the New York Times reports. The novel is Pynchon’s first in more than a decade and is set in 1932 during the Great Depression. Shadow Ticket, which will be released on October 7 by Penguin Press, follows a private eye named Hicks McTaggart whose mission to find the heir to a Wisconsin cheese empire goes sideways when he ends up on a trans-Atlantic Ocean liner and then in Hungary.

The American Library Association and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, whose members include museum and library workers, have sued Keith Sonderling, the acting director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) in addition to the IMLS itself; President Trump; and U.S. DOGE Service acting administrator Amy Gleason, in addition to DOGE itself, Publishers Weekly reports. The lawsuit argues that the Trump administration’s recent actions attempting to defund and shutter the IMLS are both illegal and unconstitutional.

Donovan Arthen, the interim executive director of Orion, has announced that Neal Thompson will be the magazine’s new publisher. Thompson is an author, journalist, editor, and literary arts funder. About his new appointment, Thompson said, “The work we do and the stories we tell are more important than ever. During challenging times—economically, politically, environmentally—we want readers to find comfort and inspiration in our pages, and we aspire to be an urgent and eloquent voice for the planet and all its creatures.”

Jeff O’Neal writes for Book Riot about Publishers Weekly’s decision to charge for review submissions. “[I]n this day and age of big tech platform media dominance, finding a new, sustainable, non-advertising revenue source is both clever and necessary.” He adds that the new policy “also has the secondary effect (perhaps primary?) of reducing the number of submissions.” Especially as AI-generated books flood the marketplace, he points out, the new guidelines will limit the number of books submitted for review consideration.

The shortlist for the International Booker Prize has been announced, the New York Times reports. The list includes On the Calculation of Volume: 1 (Faber) by Solvej Balle, translated from the Danish by Barbara J. Haveland; Perfection (Fitzcarraldo Editions) by Vincenzo Latronico, translated from the Italian by Sophie Hughes; Small Boat (Small Axes) by Vincent Delecroix, translated from the French by Helen Stevenson; Under the Eye of the Big Bird (Granta Books) by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from the Japanese by Asa Yoneda; Heart Lamp (And Other Stories) by Banu Mushtaq, translated from the Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi; and A Leopard-Skin Hat (Lolli Editions) by Anne Serre, translated from the French by Mark Hutchinson.

On April 3, a federal judge in Rhode Island denied a motion to block the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) from “prohibiting grant recipients from using grant funding to promote ‘gender ideology’ as defined by President Donald Trump in an executive order issued on January 20,” Publishers Weekly reports. The judge noted that following the filing of the lawsuit, the NEA retracted its implementation of the executive order, “pending further administrative review.” In a statement, ACLU senior staff attorney Vera Eidelman said that the opinion “makes clear that the NEA cannot lawfully reimpose its viewpoint-based eligibility bar.”

Boris Kachka writes for the Atlantic about the future of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) in Trump’s America. Though many universities, law firms, and corporations are capitulating to Trump’s demands, AWP’s executive director, Michelle Aielli, said that AWP will remain steadfast in its goals: “As of right now, the plan is not to scrub our website, not to change words, and, more importantly, not to change our mission,” she said. Anticipating the loss of a significant federal grant, the organization will focus on raising funding elsewhere.

Denise Lyons writes for Library Journal about the role libraries play in disaster preparedness and recovery. Because public libraries are often located in central areas, they are strategic partners during crises, offering shelter and other basic needs during severe weather, coordinating efforts to donate materials, and collecting information and resources to distribute to their communities.

Twelve U.S. copyright cases against OpenAI and Microsoft have been combined in New York, even though most of the authors and newspapers suing the tech companies were opposed to centralization, the Guardian reports. The U.S. judicial panel on multidistrict litigation said that centralization will “allow a single judge to coordinate discovery, streamline pretrial proceedings, and eliminate inconsistent rulings.” Authors Ta-Nehisi Coates, Michael Chabon, Junot Díaz, and the comedian Sarah Silverman are among the authors whose cases will be transferred from California to New York and joined with cases brought by the New York Times as well as other authors, including John Grisham, George Saunders, and Jonathan Franzen.

Eve Bridburg, the founder and executive director of GrubStreet, is stepping down from her role at the end of 2025. Bridburg served as executive director for fifteen years and founded GrubStreet twenty-eight years ago. In a statement posted to GrubStreet’s website she wrote, “Our mission and vision have never mattered more. In moments like this—when human and civil rights are under attack and polarization is deepening—we need writers to help us understand the world, frame and reframe the issues, and imagine new possibilities.”

The Trump administration is demanding enormous cuts to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the New York Times reports. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is recommending that the NEH reduce its staff by 70 to 80 percent (approximately 180 people). Additionally, the DOGE recommendations could amount to a termination of all grants made under the Biden administration that have not been fully paid out. The NEH was founded in 1965 and has distributed more than $6 billion in grants to museums, historical sites, universities, libraries, and other cultural institutions since then.

The National Book Foundation has announced this year’s 5 Under 35 honorees: Stacie Shannon Denetsosie, Megan Howell, Maggie Millner, Alexander Sammartino, and Jemimah Wei. All the writers will receive $1,250 at a public ceremony in New York on June 4.

Niko Pfund has been named the new director of Yale University Press, Publishers Weekly reports. Pfund joins Yale from Oxford University Press, where he served as global academic publisher and president of its U.S. division. Pfund succeeds John Donatich, who has led Yale University Press since 2003, and is retiring on June 30.

The New York Public Library has published a list of the twenty-five best new poetry books for adults. The list includes Book of Kin (Autumn House Press) by Darius Atefat-Peckham, Forest of Noise (Knopf) by Mosab Abu Toha, and Yard Show (BOA Editions) by Janice N. Harrington, among other titles.

A group of authors including Richard Osman, Kazuo Ishiguro, Kate Mosse, and Val McDermid have signed an open letter calling on the UK government to hold Meta accountable over its use of copyrighted books to train artificial intelligence, the Guardian reports. The statement, written by the Society of Authors, was published on Change.org in the form of a petition, and has since garnered nearly 5,000 signatures.

Matthew Purdy writes in the New York Times Magazine about what George Orwell, author of the prescient novel 1984, might think about politics today. “In 1984, the ultimate power is the power to define truth,” Purdy writes. “And it remains so.”

In the New York Times, A.O. Scott reflects on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, which turns one hundred this year. Scott considers the afterlives and possible contexts for Jay Gatsby with subtitles including “Jazz Age Gatsby,” “Existential Gatsby,” “High-Low Gatsby,” and “Hip-Hop Gatsby.” Images from film, television, and other media are integrated into the article, reinforcing the novel’s enduring impact on popular culture.

The Rumpus has announced that Roxane Gay and Debbie Millman will be the magazine’s new owners. Gay and Millman will take over the Rumpus starting May 1, succeeding the magazine’s current publisher, Alyson Sinclair. Roxane Gay, a founding essays editor of the Rumpus, said, “It’s a truly full-circle moment,” and Debbie Millman, a celebrated designer, writer, and educator, plans to bring renewed attention to the way visual artists appear in the magazine.

The University of Georgia Press has announced a new series called African Language Literatures in Translation, a venue for both classic and contemporary literature originally written in indigenous African languages. The series editors will be Alexander Fyfe and Christopher Ernest Ouma, and the first titles are slated to be published in Spring 2026. Fyfe says, “With this series, we want to create a sustainable venue for translations of African-language writing that makes texts available to Anglophone readerships, while contributing positively and responsibly to the publishing and translation ecosystems that already support African writing.”

In the latest installment of the New York Times series By the Book, Maggie Smith discusses her new book, Dear Writer: Pep Talks & Practical Advice for the Creative Life (One Signal Publishers, April 2025), and “unlearning” her identity as a poet. “I’d thought of myself as a poet only for many years, and I’ve had to set that limiting belief aside, to unlearn it, in order to write other kinds of books without feeling like an interloper in other genres,” she says. Read an excerpt from Smith’s Dear Writer in the January/February 2025 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Fiona McFarlane has won this year’s Story Prize (which awards $20,000) for her short story collection Highway Thirteen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024).

Canadian booksellers have united to ask that Prime Minister Mark Carney exclude books from the 25 percent counter-tariffs scheduled to take effect on April 2 on $125 billion worth of goods imported from the U.S., Publishers Weekly reports. The executive director of the Canadian Independent Booksellers’ Association and the CEO of the bookstore chain Indigo Books & Music penned a joint letter stating that imposing tariffs on books would have “devastating consequences for Canadian readers, our businesses, and our cultural landscape.” Industry professionals are concerned that books printed and distributed through U.S. warehouses would be subject to the additional tariff, which would be catastrophic for Canadian bookstores and the livelihoods of thousands of Canadians.

Cat Zhang writes for New York magazine about how Simon & Schuster’s new publisher, Sean Manning, is innovating in the book business and seeking to establish brand loyalty with readers. Manning made headlines six months into his new role when he announced that the imprint would no longer require blurbs. He also “admits to taking cues” from other publishing companies who have brokered partnerships with retailers, hosted festivals, and produced multimedia content. “We’re essentially an entertainment company with books at the center. Every Tuesday, we have a new author who’s a cultural tastemaker,” he says.“Why aren’t we using them? Why are we so dependent on outside media?”

The Alabama Public Library Service Board of Trustees recently voted to defund the Fairhope Public Library after conservative parents complained about books in the teen section, the Guardian reports. The board chairperson, John Wahl, who is also the chair of the Alabama Republican Party, claimed that the library is in violation of state policies to protect youth from inappropriate materials. Read Freely Alabama has started a fundraiser to try to replace the $42,000 in state funding for the Fairhope library.

After releasing longlists for its annual awards, PEN America has been met with criticism for the second year, Publishers Lunch reports. At least two authors—Kaveh Akbar and Brandon Shimoda—have withdrawn their books from consideration for the $75,000 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, referring readers to Writers Against the War on Gaza for more information. Last year, one third of nominated authors withdrew their books from consideration for the awards and PEN America ended up donating the funds dedicated to the Jean Stein Award to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund at the direction of Stein’s estate.

Publishers Weekly reports on the ways book industry leaders are responding to the implications of generative AI. Organizations including the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and the Association of University Presses have responded to the White House’s request for public comment regarding the administration’s development of an Artificial Intelligence Action Plan. AAP emphasized the importance of copyright protections and noted that American publishers generate almost $30 billion a year in the U.S. alone. Several licensing platforms are also now appearing on the market to mediate the legal use of copyrighted material for AI training.