As of May 1, DeFiore and Company and the Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency (SKLA) will combine forces to create one larger agency under DeFiore’s name, Publishers Lunch reports. In a statement Brian DeFiore, the founder of DeFiore and Company, said, “The goal is to create an even more supportive, nimble, and powerful framework for all of us to serve our clients masterfully.” Stuart Krichevksy added, “I have always promised myself that I would secure SKLA’s future well before I make any plans to step down, and can think of no better home for the superb team we have built than at DeFiore and Company.” This new firm will be based out of DeFiore’s Union Square offices in New York City. 

Lost Kite Editions, the Minneapolis-based nonprofit press dedicated to publishing literature from underrepresented writers, is set to debut its inaugural list this May, Publishers Weekly reports. The first two titles are “21 Birthdays by Kennedy Amenya Gisege, a long-form essay about being separated from his daughter by prison bars, and Disfigured Hours, a collection of poems by B Batchelor about life in prison.” An editorial board member of Lost Kite, and founder of the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, Jennifer Bowen, added that the press is acquiring books from “a very integrative community of writers on the inside and writers on the outside” of the prison system. Editors of the press will represent a mix of those who are currently, or were previously, incarcerated, as well as those who have never been in prison; together they will help shape the literary landscape with their editorial decisions. 

Oprah Winfrey has entered into a multiyear licensing deal with Amazon, reports Nicole Sperling of the New York Times. “The former doyenne of daytime talk will produce twice-a-week video podcasts beginning this summer, create specials focused on her Favorite Things and Book Club labels, and repurpose the 25-season library from ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show.’” The tech giant will be promoting Winfrey’s popular book club via Audible, Kindle, and Goodreads to further its reach. Of this partnership, Winfrey stated, “Expanding our reach globally is an opportunity I embrace, as we continue to connect through stories that invite new ways of seeing, and hopefully deepen, understanding.”

While the Anthropic settlement continues to dominate headlines, another copyright lawsuit from authors against a tech company for its AI training is moving through Northern California federal court, Publisher Lunch reports. “Plaintiffs Stewart O’Nan, Abdi Nazemian, Brian Keene, Rebecca Makkai, and Jason Reynolds claim that MosaicML, which provides training data for AI companies and is owned by Databricks, used the Books3 dataset to train their own large language model, called MPT, and Databricks’s LLM, called DBRX.” The defendant had filed a motion to dismiss the case—and, indeed, the tech company was successful in getting an earlier version of the complaint dismissed last year—but the judge recently ruled that the allegations in the current version of the lawsuit are sufficient for the case to proceed.

Gotham Ghostwriters, an agency specializing in connecting editorial specialists with clients such as CEOs, nonprofit directors, thought leaders, and celebrities, has published a set of guidelines for AI use in an attempt to establish “baseline industry standards for collaborative writers and their clients,” according to Publishers Weekly. “At the center of the guidelines is a page-long list of ‘Recommended Disclosures,’ which enumerates specific ways in which ghostwriting professionals might use generative AI tools for administrative tasks; ‘research, analysis, and collaborations’; and generative uses, including ‘generating initial drafts of text content that will be revised later’ and ‘generating initial drafts of graphics.’” Gotham Ghostwriters CEO Dan Gerstein is quoted in a statement as saying, “We have clearly seen that artificial intelligence has both benefits and pitfalls for writers.... So it’s our central challenge as a profession to find meaningful ways to maximize the opportunities of AI while minimizing the threats.”

Aspen Words last night announced the winner of the ninth annual Aspen Words Literary Prize , a $35,000 award for a work of fiction that illuminates a vital contemporary issue and demonstrates the transformative power of literature on thought and culture. Maria Reva won the award for Endling (Doubleday, 2025). Reva was selected as the recipient of the prize by an independent five-member jury comprised of Kate Bowler, Michael Cader, Jamil Jan Kochai, Imbolo Mbue, and Héctor Tobar. Head juror Tobar was quoted in a press release saying, “As jurors, we were impressed by the ambition of Endling, by the way it wove together ecological themes with an epic story about the war in Ukraine. At the same time, it was a bold work that played with the very idea of what the literary form of a novel can be.”

Keep in mind that this Saturday, April 25, is Independent Bookstore Day. Indiebound.org has a nifty map of participating bookstores and an extensive list of how those bookstores are celebrating. For more about the history of Indie Bookstore Day and how last year’s special day brought something unexpected to the online retail environment, read “The Clash of Amazon and the Indies” (March/April 2026) by Priscilla Wu. 

Harper One president and publisher Judith Curr is set to retire on May 29, according to Publishers Lunch. Prior to joining HarperCollins, where she launched the Harper Via imprint, Curr founded Atria Books as a division of Simon & Schuster, where she worked with authors such as Colleen Hoover, Jodi Picoult, and Jennifer Weiner.

Susan Choi and Lily King join four debut authors with titles shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for fiction, the Guardian reports. Choi’s Flashlight and King’s Heart the Lover are shortisted for the prize worth £30,000 (approximately $40,497), along with Dominion by Addie E. Citchens, The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, The Mercy Step by Marcia Hutchinson, and Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly. The winner will be announced on June 11. 

The Oregon nonprofit Literary Arts recently announced the winners of the 2026 Oregon Book Awards, celebrating the thriving literary culture of the state. Winners included Jennifer Perrine, who received the Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry for Beautiful Outlaw (Kelsey Street Press); Ling Ling Huang, who received the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction for Immaculate Conception (Dutton); and Judith Barrington, who received the Sarah Winnemucca Award for Creative Nonfiction for Virginia’s Apple: Collected Memoirs (Oregon State University Press). The Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award was given to Willamette Writers, the largest writers organization in the Pacific Northwest, in recognition of “outstanding, long-term support of Oregon’s literary community.”

The “new adult” fiction category seems here to stay, observes Daniel Yadin in Publishers Weekly. Fueled by BookTok and a generation of readers raised in the age of “YA juggernaut series,” the “new adult” category has been embraced by Big Five publishers in the last two years. St. Martin’s launched its new adult imprint Saturday Books in 2024; imprints Berkley XO, Requited, and Scarlett Press followed as projects of Penguin Young Readers; Little, Brown; and Simon & Schuster.  “Late teens to twenties is a unique period in someone’s life, and that hasn’t been fully recognized as its own category,” Lisa Yoskowitz, editorial lead of Requited, told PW. “This does feel like the moment to be meeting it.”

On the occasion of Earth Day, the Academy of American Poets has announced the winners of the 2026 Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize, an annual award recognizing “exceptional poems that help readers recognize the vulnerable state of our environment.” This year’s first-place poem is “In the not-not-woods” by Malia Maxwell; poets W. J. Herbert, Ronald Carson, and Deahna Fumerol were also honored. All four poets will have their poems appear in the Academy’s Poem-a-Day series, which reaches 330,000 readers and podcast listeners daily. (Learn more about the Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize in “Celebrating the Earth That Lifts Us Up: Contests Honoring Environmental Writing” by Emma Hine, featured in the May/June 2026 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.)

Rightsholders for more than 91 percent of the works named in the Anthropic lawsuit have filed claims in the class action settlement for the company’s pirating of books to train their LLM, according to Publishers Lunch. “Attorneys received 119,876 claims by the March 30 deadline, according to the court filing. Those account for 440,490 of the 482,460 works on the works list.”

Former librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, who was fired by President Donald Trump last year, was among three honorees recognized by the Authors Guild at the organization’s annual fundraising gala on Monday night, the Associated Press reports. “In many places today, librarians are under attack for believing in the power of the written word and in the principle that free people should be able to read freedom. Yet librarians remain steady and hopeful,” said Hayden, who received the Champion of Writers Award. The other honorees were authors Percival Everett, who received the Baldacci Award for Literary Activism, and Amy Tan, recipient of the Preston Award for Distinguished Service to the Literary Community.

Eight handwritten letters from John Keats to Fanny Brawne were returned to the family of John Hay “Jock” Whitney, the former U.S. ambassador to the UK, after being stolen from Whitney’s home in the 1980s, the Guardian reports. “Brawne was Keats’s neighbor in Hampstead, with whom he became infatuated and elevated to muse and goddess.” The thirty-seven letters, valued at approximately $2 million, are dated between 1819 and 1820.

The American Library Association (ALA) released its annual list of the most commonly challenged books at libraries across the United States, NPR reports. “The ALA says that it documented 4,235 unique titles being challenged in 2025—the second-highest year on record for library challenges. (The highest ever was in 2023, with 4,240 challenges documented—only five more than in this most recent year.)” The eleven most frequently targeted books are Sold by Patricia McCormick, The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe, Empire of Storms by Sarah J. Maas, Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo, Tricks by Ellen Hopkins, A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas, A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, Identical by Ellen Hopkins, Looking for Alaska by John Green, and Storm and Fury by Jennifer L. Armentrout.

Bookshop.org’s sales grew by 55 percent last year, reports Publishers Weekly. Six years since its inception, the online bookseller, which offers a revenue stream to independent bookstores and gives readers an alternative to Amazon in the process, continues to grow due to increased sales for romance books, new e-book sales, and a Spotify partnership, started in February of this year, that allows users to buy print books in the app through Bookshop. “If I told you in 2019 that there was going to be a massive resurgence of indie bookstores after twenty years of decline, nobody would have believed me,” says Andy Hunter, Bookshop’s CEO.

Books clubs throughout Los Angeles have evolved into unconventional and diverse community-focused events, reports Malia Mendez of the Los Angeles Times. “Driven by Gen Z and millennial organizers eager to shed the isolation of the pandemic era, events ranging from book crawls to silent reading parties are successfully turning time spent with literature into happening social occasions.” The duo behind the Preoccupied literary platform even started a walking book club, which includes a forty-minute stroll with a featured author followed by shopping at a local bookstore.  

The winners of the 38th annual Publishing Triangle Awards were recently announced. The following ten titles were selected “as the very best in LGBTQ+ literature published in 2025.” Drought by Scott Alexander Hess (Rebel Satori Press) won the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ+ Fiction; Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu (Little, Brown) won the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction; Beyond the Lesbian Vampire: Reclaiming the Violent Lesbian in Contemporary Queer Horror by Sam Tabet (University of Wales Press) won the Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction; Baldwin: A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) won the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction; The Boy Kingdom / El reino de los varones by Achy Obejas (Beacon Press) won the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry; I Do Know Some Things by Richard Siken (Copper Canyon Press) won the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry; Local Woman by Jzl Jmz (Nightboat Books) won the Leslie Feinberg Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature; Mirage City by Lev AC Rosen (Minotaur Books) won the Joseph Hansen Award for LGBTQ+ Crime Writing; We Can Never Leave by H. E. Edgmon (Wednesday Books) won the Jacqueline Woodson Award for LGBTQ+ Young Adult and Children’s Literature; and What Is Queer Food?: How We Served a Revolution by John Birdsall (Norton) won the Amber Hollibaugh Award for LGBTQ+ Social Justice Writing. Each winner will receive $1,000. 

Publishers Weekly has announced its 2026 Bookstore of the Year: Watchung Booksellers in Montclair, New Jersey. The beloved bookstore has been in business since 1991 and is praised for the community it engenders; its unique spirit inspired former Watchung staffer Lily Braun-Arnold to pen her YA novel The Last Bookstore on Earth informed by the magic of her “home away from home.” In her letter nominating the store for the award, journalist Candy J. Cooper described it as “a cozy reading space for toddlers, a launchpad for local and regional authors, a recommender of great reads, a partner and promoter of the local literary festival, a beacon of sanity during the pandemic shutdown. The presence of Watchung Booksellers in the neighborhood persuaded me to move to Montclair thirty years ago and makes it difficult to imagine ever leaving now. It has meant more in my life, for my overall sense of happiness and well-being, than any other local business.”