A New Jersey school district faces controversy after pulling a title from its curriculum in response to a mental health crisis at its schools, NPR reports. After five reported suicide attempts by students at Columbia High School in Maplewood, administrators’ “most immediate response” to the crisis was to remove The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz from its AP English Literature and Composition curriculum. After pushback from parents, students may now read the book with signed permission—terms that PEN America says amount to a book ban. “Book restrictions in schools and libraries are often linked to objections to their treatments of sexuality or to their discussions of race. But the situation in New Jersey is part of a much larger trend, according to PEN America. In a November 2024 report, the group found nearly 60 percent of banned books are young adult titles that specifically depict grief, death, suicide, substance abuse, depression and other mental health concerns, and sexual violence.”

As a federal immigration crackdown continues to target Minneapolis and St. Paul, two literary adovacy organizations are among those that have stepped up to support children sheltering in place to avoid ICE raids, Publishers Weekly reports. The Boston literary nonprofit Reach Out and Read launched a Books for Neighbors initiative in the Twin Cities in late January, adapting its usual model of distributing books at pediatrician well visits to instead offer materials through mutual aid groups and community organizations. Separately, A Book of One’s Own, a nonprofit that works to provide books to hands of Minnesota children, has shifted focus to supporting families in the Twin Cities: “To date, 4,000 Spanish-language books have been donated to 25 public school districts—including 500 books to Liam Conejo Ramos’s school after the five-year-old was detained by ICE. A lesser quantity of Hmong and Somali books also have been donated to schools for distribution to students.”

For the New York Times, Parul Sehgal considers Toni Morrison as “a wave of Morrisoniana” deepens scholars’ sense of her ambition: “to confront the immense silences in the archives where Black life and thought are concerned.” Recent works including Toni at Random by Dana A. Williams, On Morrison by Namwali Serpell, and Language as Liberation, a volume collecting Morrison’s Princeton lectures, comprise an ever-richer portrait of her genius and legacy, also felt in the reissuing of Morrison’s eleven novels with new introductions by contemporary literary luminaries. “When a writer dies, what survives of her work is often that which is most legible, that which can be taught—her craft and technique, the public statements that distill her aims and themes. But what gives Morrison’s novels their force lies below the skin of language and outside the logic of neat précis. Morrison seems to know forbidden things—all the secrets of childhood and maternity and the marriage bed.” (An excerpt from Toni at Random, on Morrison’s career as an editor at Random House, appears in the July/August 2025 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.)

This spring, the Library of Congress will unveil The Source: Where Creativity Sparks Discovery, an experiential learning center for young people between the ages of eight and fifteen, reports Publishers Weekly. The website for this literary youth center will launch on April 2, and there will be a family day event on May 9. Shari Rosenstein Werb, director of the library’s Center for Learning, Literacy, and Engagement and The Source’s lead curator, stated, “The LoC is a research library, and you have to be sixteen to get a research card. We want to encourage young people to do research, so we’ve collected maps, audio, all sorts of things from the library that invite kids to explore the collections.” 

Michael Silverblatt, the host of KCRW’s Bookworm for over three decades, passed away on February 14, reports the Los Angeles Times. He was 73 years old. Known for his in-depth 30-minute interviews with authors such as David Foster Wallace, Joan Didion, and Zadie Smith, and his wide breadth of literary knowledge, Silverblatt became a prominent personality thanks to his unique voice and voracious reading style. During a talk at Cornell University in 2010, he said, “I’m as fantastical a creature as anything in Oz or in Wonderland. I like it if people can say, ‘I never met anyone like him,’ and by that they should mean that it wasn’t an unpleasant experience.”

Minnesota Writers Respond, an evening of fellowship in response to the current moment in Minneapolis, presented in partnership with the Loft and Milkweed Editions, is taking place on February 26. Organized by author Jessica Nordell, this public literary event will include readings from Michael Kleber-Diggs, Sarah Ghazal Ali, Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay, and Halee Kirkwood, among others. Proceeds will go toward the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota (ILCM), “a nonprofit organization that provides free immigration legal representation to low-income immigrants and refugees in Minnesota and North Dakota.”

A year-long celebration of Toni Morrison kicks off today in the legendary author’s home state of Ohio, on what would have been her 95th birthday. First festivities of Beloved: Ohio Celebrates Toni Morrison include a community gathering hosted by members of Morrison’s family in her hometown of Lorain; a Lit Cleveland event featuring Namwali Serpell, author of the new essay collection On Morrison; and library events for children honoring Morrison’s work for young readers. A statewide virtual book club will also invite participants to read all eleven of Morrison’s novels over the course of the year in the order of the time they were set, beginning with Mercy. 

Conjunctions has announced seven finalists for its inaugural Writers Helping Writers residency, which will provide a three-week retreat at Livingston Manor in upstate New York to a writer who has “shown an ongoing personal commitment to helping other writers achieve their own creative goals.” The seven finalists, “chosen from a gratifyingly large pool of candidates,” are Andrew Altschul, Donna Hemans, Ruth Joffre, Marie Myung-Ok Lee, Kristina Ten, Susan Wheeler, and Kyle Lucia Wu. Rick Moody judged. The recipient of the first annual residency will be revealed on March 4 and will make their stay in May.

This August, Zando will launch a new horror imprint, Evil Twin, with hopes of replicating the “explosive success” of its Slowburn romance line, Publishers Weekly reports. Nancy Trypuc will lead as publishing director for the imprint while continuing in the role of deputy director of marketing for Zando, where Trypuc has used the press’s social media reach to cultivate an enthusiastic community of romance readers. “We know how to build a robust and playful presence both online and IRL to meet genre readers where they gather,” said Trypuc in a statement. 

The PEN/Faulkner Foundation has announced the finalists for the 2026 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel. This year’s judges—Rachel Beanland, Dionne Irving, and Taymour Soomro—chose the following three finalists from among 146 eligible novels: The Correspondent (Crown) by Virginia Evans, Awake in the Floating City (Pantheon) by Susanna Kwan, and Blob (Harper) by Maggie Su. The winner, to be announced in early April, will receive $10,000.

Harlequin, one of the biggest publishers of romance novels in the world, plans to shut down its historical romance line in September 2027, according to a report by Reactor. “The move includes ceasing U.S. and U.K. retail efforts as well as digital publishing related to the line in those markets. The company reportedly will not acquire any new works for the line moving forward.”

The Associated Press reports on the International Damascus Book Fair, which wrapped up on Monday, the first book fair to be held in the capital of Syria following the end of the rule of Bashar Assad, who was overthrown in 2024 after the Syrian civil war. “The first book fair since Assad was unseated in December 2024 witnessed high turnout, with state media reporting that 250,000 people attended on the first day, Feb. 6, trekking out to fairgrounds where it was held about 10 miles (16 kilometers) from the city center. The fair’s director, Ahmad Naasan, said about 500 publishing companies from some 35 countries took part.”

Ahead of the Valentine’s Day weekend, the New York Times Book Review has shared a glossary of romance novel terms and tropes, from amnesia and apron tugger to yearning and zombies. The guide parses the evolving (and sometimes cultish) culture surrounding the booming genre—Publishers Weekly estimates nearly 44 million copies of romance novels sold in 2026—and invites new readers to understand its niches, so as “to achieve maximum swoon.”

In a statement to the Wire, author Arundhati Roy has announced her withdrawal from the 2026 Berlinale film festival, where she had been set to make an appearance at a screening of her film In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones. Roy’s withdrawal comes in response to controversy surrounding comments from the film festival’s jury president about the place of politics at the festival, and particularly discussion of Palestine. “This morning, like millions of people across the world, I heard the unconscionable statements made by members of the jury of the Berlin film festival when they were asked to comment about the genocide in Gaza. To hear them say that art should not be political is jaw-dropping,” said Roy. “It is a way of shutting down a conversation about a crime against humanity even as it unfolds before us in real time—when artists, writers, and filmmakers should be doing everything in their power to stop it.”

Does every writer need a room of one’s own? In the latest installment of his Open Questions column, Joshua Rothman mulls this truism for the New Yorker. Writers’ spaces hold a particular mystique for their literary acolytes, and a peek inside a beloved writer’s space can promise to reveal the “route of creativity,” as Katie da Cunha Lewin, author of The Writer’s Room: The Hidden Worlds That Shape the Books We Love, describes it. Nevertheless, Rothman and da Cunha Lewin argue, we “might do better to imagine a writer as someone conversing, exercising, socializing, and interacting, instead of merely observing—someone who is out in the world instead of shut away in a room.” (Journalist Alissa Greenberg considered the experience of writers retreats in the homes of literary heroes in the March/April 2025 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.)

For the Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper reports on the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the virtual monopoly it has on American arts and letters. There is no single entity, the federal government included, that has “a more profound influence on the fiscal health and cultural output of the humanities than the Mellon Foundation.” Some of the questions that Harper grapples with are: “What are the consequences when eye-watering sums of money are put behind the idea that the purpose of American arts and letters is not wisdom but advocacy? What happens when the humanities are seen not as having intrinsic worth, but as valuable only insofar as they can be of service to a cause?” 

Senators Adam Schiff (California) and John Curtis (Utah) have introduced the bipartisan CLEAR Act (Copyright Labeling and Ethical AI Reporting Act), Publishers Lunch reports. This bill “would require tech companies to submit a list of the copyrighted works used to create AI products to the register of copyrights” at least thirty days before a generative AI tool is released. Should a company violate the act, they would pay a penalty of at least $5,000 for each instance, and creators could take legal action against them. 

Federal judges have dismissed three lawsuits accusing author Neil Gaiman of sexual assault in New Zealand four years ago, reports the Associated Press. The former nanny of his children, Scarlett Pavlovich, filed the suits against Gaiman and his wife in February of last year, “accusing Gaiman of multiple sexual assaults while she worked as the family’s nanny in 2022.” Pavlovich was demanding at least $7 million in damages. 

Claire Kirch of Publishers Weekly looks at the ways in which Minnesota’s literary community “is coming together to support immigrants and others under attack by ICE agents, who have been an unwelcome presence in the state for the past six weeks.” Among the activities is the forthcoming publication by two affiliated publishers based in Minneapolis of an anthology, ICE Out: Minnesota Writers Rising Up, edited by Ian Leask and featuring more than fifty writers responding to ICE’s presence through poetry and prose. “In yet another show of solidarity, mystery authors Jess Lourey and Kristi Belcamino have organized Authors for Minnesota Day, slated for February 28, in which more than 50 Minnesota-based authors—including Allen Eskens, William Kent Krueger, Bao Phi, Margi Preus, and Curtis Sittenfeld—will stop by more than two dozen indie bookstores around the state to sign copies of their latest releases and give them out, along with swag kits in some cases, to anyone who donates to either the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota or the Women’s Foundation of Minnesota Immigration Rapid Response Fund.”

The Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) has announced that Host Publications is the winner of the 2026 Constellation Award. The press, based in Austin, Texas, will receive $10,000. CavanKerry Press, located in Fort Lee, New Jersey, was selected as a finalist. Given to honor an independent literary press that champions the writing of people of color, including Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian American Pacific Islander individuals, the Constellation Award was launched in 2021 by CLMP with the support of Penguin Random House. “With a current focus on poetry, Host publishes radical writing by emerging LGBTQ+, BIPOC, intersectional feminist, and immigrant voices, championing experimental writing that queers language and meaning-making, and engages with a poetics of liberation. Host works to empower its community of writers whose work inspires social transformation and creates a new sense of what is possible in writing.”