The Authors Guild has launched its Human Authored certification program, Publishers Lunch reports. For $10 per book (free to Authors Guild members), authors “can register to use the Human Authored certification mark to distinguish their human-written books from AI-generated books.” According to the program’s usage guidelines, “The certification mark may only be used in connection with literary works for which the text itself was fully authored by one or more human beings and not generated by AI, except for a de minimis amount (such as through the use of AI-powered spelling and grammar check applications). Use of generative AI to create a table of contents, indices, or other auxiliary parts of a book, or for researching, brainstorming, outlining, or any purposes other than generating text does not disqualify a work from being Human Authored.”
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Every day the editors of Poets & Writers Magazine scan the headlines—publishing reports, literary dispatches, academic announcements, and more—for all the news that creative writers need to know.
Steph Opitz has been named director of publishing services at Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, Publishers Weekly reports. Opitz, who has worked for Bookshop.org since 2022, most recently as director of bookstore partnerships, will succeed longtime Consortium president Julie Schaper, who in September announced her plans to retire.
The PEN/Faulkner Foundation has revealed the five finalists for the 2026 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Judges Samantha Hunt, Tania James, and De’Shawn Charles Winslow considered 387 eligible novels and short story collections by American authors published in the U.S. in 2025 and selected the following finalists: Dominion (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Addie E. Citchens, The White Hot (One World) by Quiara Alegría Hudes, The Sisters (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Heart the Lover (Grove Press) by Lily King, and Small Scale Sinners (A Public Space Books) by Mahreen Sohail. The winner, to be announced in early April, will receive $15,000; the remaining four finalists will each receive an honorarium of $5,000.
Media Do International, a Japanese e-book distribution company, will acquire Seven Seas Entertainment, “the largest independently owned manga publisher in the English-language market.” Seven Seas will continue to operate under its existing leadership team with the same editorial direction, and all its imprints will continue to be distributed by Penguin Random House. The publisher notes that, “The acquisition reflects continued global momentum in manga, light novels, and international storytelling across print, digital, and audio formats, and positions [us] for long-term growth within an expanding worldwide readership.”
The digital catalog service Edelweiss has announced a discount tier for publishers, allowing presses to make their titles searchable within the platform, visible in saved filter results, and eligible for inclusion in curated collections for bookstores, libraries, and media sources, reports Publishers Weekly. The company’s CEO, John Rubin, said, “This new offering is designed to provide a clear, affordable option for title visibility, while still preserving the functionality and value that our full-service publisher partners rely on.” This announcement comes on the heels of criticism from the literary community when Edelweiss raised prices and fees following its acquisition by Valsoft in December 2024. Details on the rollout will be announced in the coming months, and the launch of this new offering is expected later this year.
The American Academy of Arts and Letters recently announced their eleven new members for 2026, including, in literature: Sandra Cisneros, Marie Howe, Pico Iyer, Rick Moody, Carl Phillips, and U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze. The academy’s website states, “The three hundred members of Arts and Letters are divided into departments of architecture, art, literature, and music, and are elected in recognition of notable achievement in their fields. Members are elected for life, pay no dues, and nominate and elect new members as vacancies occur.” The new members, alongside three honorary members, will be inducted during the annual Arts and Letters ceremony in May, with Zadie Smith delivering the keynote address.
The American Library Association has taken to social media to “strongly denounce” House Resolution 7661 (H.R. 7661), new legislation initiated on Tuesday aimed at censoring trans narratives and “sexually-oriented material” in public school libraries. Earlier this week, Kelly Jensen wrote about the resolution for Book Riot. “Such a broad definition also ensures that this kind of bill could be applicable in any situation where it would benefit the banners,” argued Jensen. “It isn’t a stretch to see a bill like this used to outright ban all books by or about LGBTQ+ people under the guise of it being ‘sexually oriented.’”
In an opinion piece for Publishers Weekly, Jason Low, publisher and co-owner of the multicultural book publisher Lee & Low books, describes how recent book bans have upended Lee & Low’s Diversity Baseline Survey. Low says the survey, which had become “the industry standard for inclusive hiring practices and accountability” since its initiation in 2017 and which is typically conducted every four years, “will be postponed until further notice” because of “more pressing matters.” Low thanked publishers for the attention given to past surveys before considering the state of inclusivity and diversity in publishing: “As far as books for children go, the diversity movement is by and large in limbo. In the face of extreme censorship that targets diverse authors and titles, our first priority as publishers must shift toward continuing to publish and sell diverse books for children in contentious times. The second priority is to redirect the time and effort we would have spent on DBS 4.0 and channel it toward the fight to ban book bans.”
Tom Hanks is set to star in the film adaptation of George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, Kirkus Reviews reports. The acclaimed novel, for which Saunders received the Booker Prize, imagines a grieving Abraham Lincoln amid a polyvocal chorus of ghosts as Lincoln’s recently deceased son lingers between death and rebirth. The film adaptation will combine live action and stop-motion animation, and will mark the prolific actor’s first time portraying an American president. (Saunders spoke about conceiving of the novel as such and cultivating “narrative alertness” in a feature by Kevin Larimer in the March/April 2017 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.)
Ann Godoff, the founder, president, and editor-in-chief of Penguin Press, passed away on Tuesday evening due to bone cancer complications, reports Publishers Lunch. Starting off in the industry as an assistant to Simon & Schuster editor Alice Mayhew, Godoff became a senior editor at Atlantic Monthly Press in 1987, moving to Random House in 1991, where she continued to grow professionally. Penguin Press publisher Scott Moyers writes, “Ann’s impact on American book culture over the past four decades is incalculable. … Beyond the industry accolades, her legacy should be measured in her success in helping authors create indelible new spaces in the minds of readers.”
Tyrant Books, an independent publisher based in Rome, Italy, and New York City, will resume publishing, reports Publishers Weekly, after being largely dormant following the sudden death of its founder Giancarlo DiTrapano in 2021. Luke Goebel, who previously worked as an unpaid assistant at Tyrant Books, will now oversee its editorial direction and expansion, serving as one of two individuals having an acquisition of 50 percent ownership. Regarding the reason behind this acquisition, Goebel notes, “I did it for one reason: to ensure that Tyrant would never be absorbed into any corporate ecosystem whose financial roots trace back to power structures fundamentally misaligned with what this press represents.” The other owner is Matthew Johnson of Fat Possum Records, who provided early funding for the press.
Dan Barry of the New York Times reports on the online scammers that are preying on the literary world as of late. From personal experience, he writes, “It turns out that the fawning e-mails I’ve been receiving are mere specks in a virtual mudslide of fraud descending upon the publishing world.” Overseas scam artists have been using AI to impersonate literary figures such as George Saunders and Colson Whitehead, as well as literary agents, publishing houses, and, more recently, the National Book Foundation, to flatter writers while offering false editorial, publishing, or promotional services for a fee. Many literary associations are issuing warnings so writers don’t continue to fall for these messages. (Read the Poets & Writers alert about such scams that was posted last October.)
Spotify has announced the launch of Audiobook Charts, a publicly-available list of its most popular audiobook titles of the week, Book Riot reports. In addition to listing its overall most-streamed audiobooks, Audiobook Charts will offer breakdowns of popularity by genre in categories including romance, science fiction and fantasy, and memoir. At the top of the inaugurual chart for overall listens is Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights as narrated by Billie Fulford-Brown.
A project by a Wesleyan University undergraduate seeks to “help underprivileged youth leaders in Mongolia improve their writing skills and amplify the voices and concerns of their community,” according to the university. A political science major seeking to support peers in her native country, Tamiraa Sanjaajav launched the Nomadvocate Youth Civic Writing Lab to give young Mongolians literacy skills that might in turn translate to political empowerment. “In the first iteration of the program in June 2025, Sanjaajav hosted thirty Mongolian students in-person in Ulaanbaatar, the capital city, for a month-long writing- and discussion-intensive initiative. The second iteration of the program occurred in winter of 2025 online, engaging over one hundred and eighty participants and twenty volunteers.” The program expands this summer to communities in rural Mongolia.
The Booker Prize Foundation has announced the longlist for the 2026 International Booker Prize, an eclectic group “featuring stories of witchcraft, warfare, trauma, transformation, and more.” The list comprises thirteen titles translated from eleven langauges, and includes three debuts. The longlisted titles are The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran (Scribe) by Shida Bazyar, translated from German by Ruth Martin; We Are Green and Trembling (New Directions) by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, translated from Spanish by Robin Myers; The Remembered Soldier (New Vessel) by Anjet Daanje, translated from Dutch by David McKay; The Deserters (New Directions) by Mathias Énard, translated from French by Charlotte Mandell; Small Comfort (HarperCollins) by Ia Genberg, translated from Swedish by Kira Josefsson; She Who Remains (Sandorf Passage) by Rene Karabash, translated from Bulgarian by Izidora Angel; The Director (Summit) by Daniel Kehlmann, translated from German by Ross Benjamin; On Earth As It Is Beneath (Charco) by Ana Paula Maia, translated from Portuguese by Padma Viswanathan; The Duke (Foundry) by Matteo Melchiorre, translated from Italian by Antonella Lettieri; The Witch (Vintage) by Marie NDiaye, translated from French by Jordan Stump; Women Without Men (Syracuse University Press) by Shahrnush Parsipur, translated from Persian by Faridoun Farrokh; The Wax Child (New Directions) by Olga Ravn, translated from Danish by Martin Aitken; and Taiwan Travelogue (Graywolf) by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King. The winner will be announced on May 19.
In an essay for the Atlantic, John Williams, the former editor of the Washington Post’s now-defunct Book World, argues that an editor should serve subscribers, not data. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, owner of the Post, recently said, “Each and every day our readers give us a roadmap to success. The data tells us what is valuable and where to focus.” In response, Williams writes: “As a reader of many distinctive publications, I want to be led by them. What makes them special is where they choose to take me, and how much I trust them to do that. In a subscription business, you are not just trying to reach new people, crucial as that is; you are also trying to retain those you already have. Sizable, steadfast subscriber bases are hard-won, and keeping them involves the fulfillment of an unspoken contract as well as the actual one that paying readers sign. I expect publications I support to attempt growth without radically changing the focus or quality of the work or pivoting to some get-traffic-quick scheme every time readership dips over a holiday weekend.”
A new study by the National Literacy Trust shows that only 10 percent of boys age 14 to 16 read daily for pleasure in the UK, according to a report by the Guardian. “While reading declines for both boys and girls in early adolescence, there are ‘signs of recovery’ among girls in later teenage years, but boys’ engagement remains persistently low.”
Over four hundred independent bookstores in the UK will have to pay higher business rates starting in April due to adjustments in the country’s budget, reports Publishers Lunch. Added on to this, some stores’ taxes will be doubled. These financial changes are being called “a disaster” by the UK’s Bookseller Association, which is asking their government for permanent reductions in business rates for booksellers.
The New Yorker’s Casey Cep covers the unlikely success of a bookstore in Alabama with a unique business model. The Alabama Booksmith, run by ninety-year-old Jake Reiss, only sells signed, first editions of hardcover books, mostly at the publishers’ prices. Cep writes, “Because Reiss guarantees sales of several hundred copies, he can sometimes convince publicists to add a book-tour stop in Birmingham, even if it’s just for a lightning signing during which he and his team serve as a kind of human conveyor belt, shuffling signature-ready books by so speedily that the author can make it to a nearby city for another event that same night. When that strategy doesn’t work, he’s not above begging authors directly.”
Ingram Content Group has announced a new digital catalog and galley platform to aid publishers in sharing titles with booksellers, media, and librarians, reports Publishers Weekly. Covered, the new online service from the company, will have a beta launch this fall for a select group of industry professionals with broader industry availability to come in 2027. This platform is meant to serve as a more cost-effective competitor to Edelweiss and NetGalley, the former of which hiked up its prices in 2024, making waves in the literary community.
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.”
The New York Times reveals the quick responses and careful considerations that are triggered inside a publishing house when a forthcoming book, in this case the novel Murder Bimbo by Rebecca Novack, hews a little too close to the news cycle for comfort. Avid Reader Press, the publisher of Novack’s novel about a sex worker who assassinates a right-wing politician, had already sent out hundreds of prepublication copies of the book, emblazoned with the words “Somebody had to do it” and the image of a bleeding American flag, when Charlie Kirk was killed in September, prompting Novack’s team to reconsider the publishing plan. In the end, they decided to remove certain biographical information about the author from the finished book and the publisher’s website. “The circumstances surrounding Murder Bimbo were particularly extreme. But any publisher putting out a book in the current news environment faces significant marketing and publicity challenges.”
Literary Arts has announced the finalists for this year’s Oregon Book Awards. Thirty-five titles by Oregon authors across seven genre categories were chosen as finalists by panels of out-of-state judges, from a total of two hundred submitted titles. The winners will be revealed at an awards ceremony on April 20. The finalists for the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction are Olufunke Grace Bankole for The Edge of Water (Tin House), Ling Ling Huang for Immaculate Conception (Dutton), Kevin Maloney for Horse Girl Fever (Clash Books), Madeline McDonnell for Lonesome Ballroom (Rescue Press), and Karen Thompson Walker for The Strange Case of Jane O. (Random House). The finalists for the Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry are H. G. Dierdorff for Rain, Wind, Thunder, Fire, Daughter (University of Nevada Press), Garrett Hongo for Ocean of Clouds (Knopf), Jennifer Perrine for Beautiful Outlaw (Kelsey Street Press), Lisa Wells for The Fire Passage (Four Way Books), and Joe Wilkins for Pastoral, 1994 (River River Books). The finalists for the Sarah Winnemucca Award for Creative Nonfiction are Judith Barrington for Virginia’s Apple: Collected Memoirs (Oregon State University Press), Karleigh Frisbie Brogan for Holding: A Memoir About Mothers, Drugs, and Other Comforts (Steerforth), Justin Hocking for A Field Guide to the Subterranean: Reclaiming the Deep Earth and Our Deepest Selves (Counterpoint Press/Catapult), Wayne Scott for The Maps They Gave Us: One Marriage Reimagined (Black Lawrence Press), and Lidia Yuknavitch for Reading the Waves (Riverhead Books).
The estate of Maya Angelou has joined Kurt Vonnegut’s estate in its case against Utah’s Sensitive Materials Law, Erin Somers of Publishers Lunch reports. Under the law, which was passed in 2022 and amended in 2024 to require public schools and their libraries “to remove certain ‘inappropriate’ books or books with any reference to sex,” Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings were banned by two school districts in Utah. Other banned books include Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner.
The longlist for the inaugural James Patterson and Bookshop.org Prize has been revealed. The award honors outstanding full-length debut books published in the United States within the past twelve months. All nominations and selections are made by booksellers working in qualifying independent bookstores. The winner will be announced on April 6 and will receive $15,000; the runner-up will receive $10,000. The longlisted books are The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders (Catapult) by Sarah Aziza, The Correspondent (Crown) by Virginia Evans, When the Tides Held the Moon (Erewhon Books) by Vanessa Vida Kelley, Aftertaste (Simon & Schuster) by Daria Lavelle, It’s Different This Time (Dell) by Joss Richard, My Oceans: Essays of Water, Whales, and Women (Curbstone Press) by Christina Rivera, The Slip (Simon & Schuster) by Lucas Schaefer, My Mother’s Boyfriends (7.13 Books) by Samantha Schoech, The Nature of Pain: Roots, Recovery, and Redemption Amid the Opioid Crisis (University Press of Kentucky) by Mandi Fugate Sheffel, and The Lilac People (Counterpoint) by Milo Todd.
Becca Rothfeld, a former nonfiction critic for the Washington Post’s Book World, laments last week’s shuttering of the stand-alone books section in a Page-Turner essay for the New Yorker, pointing out that the New York Times Book Review is the last discrete newspaper books section standing. “There are still plenty of places to read about literature, many of them excellent,” Rothfeld writes. “There are older and more established outlets, like the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books; cult favorites, like Bookforum; and irreverent newcomers, like the Drift and the Point, the latter of which I edit. These magazines are delightful and, in their own way, consistently surprising; I love reading them, and I have loved writing for them. But they are produced for an audience that already knows it cares about literature. The books section of a newspaper plays an altogether different role. It does not cater to aficionados; it seeks new recruits.”
The romance genre, known for its prolific authors and voracious readers, is at the vanguard of implementing A.I. tools, reports the New York Times. As the publishing industry’s best-selling genre, romance “relies on familiar narrative formulas” and is “built around popular tropes,” making the community particularly vulnerable to A.I.-generated work, especially since most authors don’t reveal when they have used chatbots, so as not to alienate readers. A contentious topic for writers and readers alike, one book-club leader, Zoë Mahler, noted, “Romance is about human connection, and there’s nothing more human than being vulnerable and falling in love. Why would I want to read a story written by a machine trying to emulate that?”
Publishers Lunch has announced that the Tuesday Agency, an Iowa City-based speakers agency for authors, has closed its doors. Agency president Trinity Ray said, “We have suffered the economy and politics of the day and we’re doing our best to take care of all those who put their trust in us,” as changes to rules around government loan repayments, NEA grants, and other such financial factors have made it impossible for the company to keep running. Ray is working to pay the six authors the agency still owes money to and is launching a smaller company, Goliath Jones, to continue platforming important voices.
Cengage and Hachette have responded to Google’s recent opposition to their motion to join the class action infringement suit against the tech company, reports the Association of American Publishers (AAP). The authors who started this suit welcome the participation of publishers, saying, “Proposed Interventors . . . [would] ensure the publishing industry’s discrete interests are fairly treated in class litigation where both authors and publishers’ rights are at stake.” AAP added that, per the publishers’ response, “Google’s opposition misrepresents the clear legal interests of publishers in this matter and misstates the law on timeliness of the motion to intervene.”
On the heels of the Washington Post’s elimination of its Book World supplement, Adam Kirsch of the Atlantic considers the decline of book reviews and the implications that has on the literary ecosystem as a whole. “A book critic, or a newspaper book section, is a convener, bringing people together around a new book or writer, a literary trend or controversy,” he writes. Though the disappearance of the book review does not mean the end of literary criticism overall, readers, publishers, and authors suffer in different ways. Relatedly, NPR has shared that the Post’s CEO and publisher, Will Lewis, has stepped down.