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.

For the New York Times, Colin Moynihan reports on a “previously undisclosed trove of correspondence” between Harper Lee and fellow Alabama writer Jo Beth McDaniel. The “dozens” of letters newly shared by McDaniel offer “a fuller view of [Lee’s] take on the Deep South’s transition from Depression-era segregation to the Civil Rights movement,” among other subjects, and help sketch out the beliefs of the intensely private writer, who had last given a formal interview in the 1960s. “This is a marvelous opportunity to take a more nuanced view of Harper Lee,” says Lee biographer Charles J. Shields. In one 1992 letter, Lee remarks on the response of white Southerners to pushes for Black equality: “Many Christians were challenged for the first time to be Christians. ...What was heart-breaking was to discover that people you loved—friends, relatives, neighbors—whom you assumed were civilized, harbored the most vicious feelings.”

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.

Katie Couric has launched her own book club, KCBC (Katie Couric Book Club), and chosen Virginia Evans’s novel The Correspondent (Crown, 2025) as its inaugural title, the journalist and author announced via Katie Couric Media. “As some of you might have heard, my 2026 resolution can be summed up in four words: scroll less, read more. To that end, and in an effort to hold myself accountable, I’ve started a book club! I’m so excited. My goal is to read in community, as they say, one book a month.” Couric will host a conversation with Evans about the book on Monday, January 19, on Substack.

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.”

At least eight college and university libraries across the country—in Massachusetts, Kentucky, Missouri, and Nebraska—received bomb threats this week, Book Riot reports. “Last October, at least fifteen colleges and universities received bomb threats to their libraries. Yesterday, January 12, 2025—the first day back on campus for many universities following winter break—at least eight college and university received similar library bomb threats.”

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. 

Hundreds of literary tourists are traveling to Prague to see artwork made of books, reports Literary Hub. Thanks to BookTok, visitors are heading to the capital of the Czech Republic to see “The Idiom,” a sculpture made by Slovak artist Matej Kren that consists of 8,000 books and forms a cylindrical tower “with a tear-shaped entrance and mirrors at each end,” creating an “endless” tunnel for visitors to enjoy. The piece was installed at Prague’s Municipal Library in 1998 and went viral on TikTok three years ago. As a result, the sculpture can draw up to a thousand tourists a day during peak seasons such as the holidays.

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. 

The New York Times has reported on the passing of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s toddler on January 6. The famous novelist shared details regarding the death of her 21-month-old son, Nkanu, in a WhatsApp group chat with family and close friends, the content of which has been leaked to the public. Adichie stated that his passing was due to an overdose of a sedative while he was being treated for an infection at the private Euracare Hospital in Lagos. Euracare officials are investigating the matter, though the passing of Adichie’s son has prompted an outpouring of complaints about Nigeria’s health care system. 

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.

At a moment when polls show 40 percent of American adults did not read a book in the last year, one book is nonetheless selling at record rates: the Bible. Publishers Weekly reports that Bible sales hit record highs in the United States and the U.K. in 2025, continuing an upward sales trend begun in 2021. Mark Schoenwald, CEO of HarperCollins Christian Publishing, notes that study Bibles are among the iterations of the text with sales that have soared: “What that tells me is people are not just buying Bibles, but they’re actually trying to read them and understand them and then apply them to their lives.”

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.”

Literary Hub has announced the forty fellows of the 2026 Periplus collective mentorship program for writers of color who live and work in the United States. Each fellow will be paired with an established writer who is a member of the collective and they will meet on a monthly basis “to foster community, support their writing practice, and advise on the nitty gritty of making a career as an artist.” This is the collective’s sixth year running these fellowships and they chose their newest mentees from over five hundred applicants. 

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.”

Tor Publishing Group, a division of Macmillan known for its genre fiction and prose titles, has announced the retirements of two executives: Patrick Nielsen Hayden, editor-at-large, and Linda Quinton, publisher and VP of Forge Books, Publishers Weekly reports. Separately, Hayden and Quinton spent almost forty years at the company before ending their time there on January 5. Hayden is a three-time Hugo and World Fantasy Award-winning editor, and Quinton led Forge Books, an imprint of Tor that focuses on both fiction and nonfiction, for nine years. 

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.

OverDrive—a digital platform that furnishes e-books, audiobooks, and other digital media to public libraries—has responded to Washington, D.C.’s  proposed Library E-book Pricing Fairness Amendment Act of 2025, Publishers Marketplace reports. If enacted, the legislation would aim “to prohibit libraries from paying more to license an item than the public would and avoid limiting the number of licenses and loans the library can engage in” at a time when e-book licensing prices have surged. OverDrive CEO Steve Potash challenged the measure by citing the district’s reduced spending per patron even as e-book circulation has increased. 

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.”

Utah has added three new titles to its growing list of books prohibited in the state’s public schools, banning The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult, and Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire, according to the Salt Lake Tribune. “The additions bring Utah’s total number of banned books to twenty-two.”