USA Today reports on the scourge of AI-powered scams impersonating famous authors that are flooding the writing community. In one scam, a bot that purports to be best-selling author Colleen Hoover is offering to get a writer’s book featured in USA Today for the low, low price of $200. “Scammers impersonate well-known authors. Others pose as book clubs and offer to get your book in front of hundreds of readers for a fee. Some tease a shortcut to a Hollywood adaptation deal. These days, the emails often open with flowery, highly specific praise about the book. Artificial intelligence has scraped the book’s copy and polished its own words to seem like a real, emotional appeal.” For more on scams targeting writers, read Poets & Writers Magazine’s collection of coverage on the topic.

PEN America recently announced that the Rutherford County Library Alliance, a local coalition of library advocates in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, will receive the PEN/Benenson Courage Award at the 2026 PEN America Literary Gala on May 14. “The all‑volunteer alliance galvanized its community against book bans and led opposition to a library board order to remove children’s books deemed ‘inappropriate,’” the organization said in a press release. “The county library director was fired for refusing to carry out the order.” The PEN/Benenson award honors individuals for exceptional courage in defending free expression often in the face of personal danger or intense public scrutiny.

The Academy of American Poets recently announced plans for a new prize honoring the work of Louise Bogan and her lasting impact on poetry and poetry criticism. Recipients of the $5,000 Louise Bogan Award for Poetry and Criticism will be selected annually by the Academy of American Poets’ board of chancellors. The first winner will be announced during National Poetry Month in April 2027. There is no submission process. Bogan, the fourth U.S. poet laureate, was an acclaimed poet who received Yale University’s Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1955 and the Academy of American Poets’ Fellowship in 1959, among other honors. She was also a critic and a longtime poetry reviewer for the New Yorker.

“New York City seems to be undergoing something of a literary revival in recent years,” argues Alicia Kort in TimeOut New York. “While headlines continue to sound alarms about a loneliness epidemic, New Yorkers are increasingly gathering in bars, cafés and bookstores to listen to authors and writers read aloud to crowds.” Kort cites the immense popularity of this year’s BookCon in the city, which sold out four months in advance and drew a crowd of 25,000, and droves of local BookTok fans, “newly voracious readers actually want to get together to discuss the books that have been enthralling them.” Penina Roth, founder of the Franklin Park Reading Series, concurs: “In general, Gen Z seems to be reading more and turning away from online activity, I think likely because of the vitriol on social media and a desire for more real world interaction. Reading is also becoming a less solitary activity.”

A former HarperCollins executive has created a free public dashboard that makes sale numbers for indie press titles available to anyone. In a discussion of the dashboard for Publishers Weekly, creator Jim Hana describes the way the new tool, Small Press Insights, offers a more accessible vantage on figures that are often kept from the public. “I left Harper about six months ago. I came back from AWP [the Association of Writers & Writing Programs annual conference] this year and, maybe because I didn’t have access to all the data I used to have, I just couldn’t get oriented in this world,” Hana told Publishers Weekly. “At a big house there’s BookScan—very expensive, very proprietary—plus internal data, whatever you can glean from a big data science department, which I oversaw. I was interested in: what can you put together that’s freely available?” The resulting dashboard tracks sales of “roughly nine hundred indie and university presses against Amazon rankings, the Independent Publishers Caucus’s weekly Top 40, and forthcoming-title feeds from Edelweiss and NetGalley.” This week, at the top of Hana’s ranking chart is Viktor E. Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (Beacon Press, 2006), followed by more recent titles from Beth Brower and Lily King.

A lost copy of the earliest surviving poem in the English language has surfaced at a national library in Rome, reports the Guardian. The newly-uncovered manuscript contains the text of Caedmon’s Hymn, a nine-line verse that the illiterate Northumbrian cattle herder Caedmon originally composed sometime in the seventh century. This iteration of the poem is thought to have been transcribed by an Italian monk sometime between 800 CE and 830 CE, making it the third-oldest known copy in existence. Scholar Mark Faulkner, who discovered the text together with his Trinity College Dublin colleague Elisabetta Magnanti, notes that the text employs full stops after every word, evidencing the recent advent of word spacing:“It is part of the early development of ways of dividing words and shows text starting to come towards the presentation of English that we know today.”

Jim Milliot of Publishers Weekly writes about the potential for major changes to printing in light of a new report from the Book Manufacturers’ Institute. “One potential shift in the publisher-printer relationship could stem from publishers’ growing acceptance of digital printing, as they become more willing to deviate from offset printing in order to lower costs.” Milliot notes that the unit cost of each individual book would likely be higher with digital printing but that the report emphasizes the shift would allow for greater flexibility for ordering, reducing inventory costs.

TikTok has released its first monthly BookTok bestseller list in the UK, Books + Publishing reports. “The list features the books that are ‘the most successful titles within the #BookTok community each month,’ and was first launched in Germany in 2023 before expanding to Austria and Switzerland in 2024.” Topping the bestseller list for March, perhaps not surprising, is Rachel Reid’s Heated Rivalry.

The New York Public Library recently announced five finalists for the Young Lions Fiction Award, a $10,000 prize honoring the work of “exceptional early-career authors.” They are Ariel Courage for Bad Nature (Henry Holt, 2025), Kyle Edwards for Small Ceremonies (Pantheon, 2025), Harris Lahti for Foreclosure Gothic (Astra House, 2025), Carrie R. Moore for Make Your Way Home (Tin House, 2025), and Stephanie Wambugu for Lonely Crowds (Little, Brown, 2025). The judges are Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Raven Leilani, and Alexander Sammartino. The winner will be announced on June 15.

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.”