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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.
In an essay for Business Insider, Alice Amayu writes about being accepted into the University of Sydney’s creative writing graduate program and deciding not to enroll after seeing how AI is “ruining the media landscape and the book industry.” Amayu writes: “There are days when I wonder what my classes would have been like, and it makes me sad that I’ll never experience them. Many people are still pursuing MFAs, and it’s still worth it.”
According to Publishers Weekly, Humanities Tennesee recently announced that Southern Festival of Books will return this year after months of uncertainty “following federal funding cuts.” Thanks to “community support, new donations, and an expanded partnership with Vanderbilt University,” the festival will be held from October 18 to October 19.
In an interview with the Guardian’s Hannah Marriott, Barbara Kingsolver talks about Higher Ground, the recovery residence that she recently established using royalties from her best-selling novel Demon Copperhead, a retelling of Dickens during Virginia’s opioid crisis. The residence, Marriott writes, “provides a safe place to live for women whose lives have been torn apart by addiction, who are seeking long-term recovery.”
Emma Alpern of New York magazine explores the lasting appeal of literary authors on Substack, such as George Saunders, Garth Greenwell, Brandon Taylor, and Ottessa Moshfegh. “[M]uch of what’s popping up on Substack is appealingly specific, the kind of stuff that’s unpublishable elsewhere,” Alpern writes.
The BBC’s Steven McIntosh unpacks the details of an investigation by the Observer’s Chloe Hadjimatheou into author Raynor Winn’s best-selling book The Salt Path. Hadjimatheou alledges that Winn fabricated or gave misleading information about some parts of the narrative of her book, which chronicles the author’s 630-mile walk on the South West Coast Path in England with her husband, who had received a diagnosis of a terminal illness. Winn has described the Observer’s article as “highly misleading.”
Sophia Valchine of the Detroit Free Press argues in USA Today that authors who use AI are lazy, pointing to AI prompts accidentally embeded in novels by authors Lena McDonald and K.C. Crowne. “I believe authors are turning to AI because they don’t want to think,” Valchine writes.
Rachel Brooks writes for Monitor on Psychology about how psychologists are combatting censorship to keep culturally diverse books accessible to the public. Research has shown that stories featuring marginalized characters have positive effects such as increasing children’s reading time and reducing in-group favoritism. Another study showed that thirty books frequently challenged in Florida were not connected to negative behavior in terms of civic involvement, mental health, school grade point average, or crime. Ironically, in some cases, the reading was associated with positive outcomes like improved civic and volunteering behavior. Brooks writes that psychologists are well-positioned advocates in the book banning conflict because they can address the important role books play in children’s development.
The 150th issue of the Believer is being published today. The anniversary issue features work by writers including Sheila Heti, Charles Johnson, and Joan Silber, among others.
The Academy of American Poets has announced that its president and executive director Ricardo Maldonado will step down on July 17. In a statement, Maldonado said, “Looking ahead to my own future, I’ve decided that it’s time for me to step down from this role in order to return to my first calling—writing—and to make space for poetry in a more personal way. I leave this role with immense gratitude for our dedicated board of directors, our chancellors, our brilliant staff, and the ever-growing community of poets and readers who make this work possible.” The Academy has opened a search for its next president and executive director.
For the New York Times, J. D. Biersdorfer recommends tools for organizing your digital library. If the e-book app on your phone or tablet is overflowing with outdated files, Biersdorfer outlines methods for clearing and sorting books in the Kindle mobile app, Apple Books library, Google Play Books library, Nook app, and Kobo app.
Nitish Pahwa writes for Slate about the lawsuits that are deciding whether tech companies have the right to train their LLMs on copyrighted works. A district judge ruled last week that Anthropic did not violate copyright law when it used the works of three authors to train the company’s chatbot, but that Anthropic’s use of pirated materials did violate copyright law. A new trial is scheduled to decide the damages owed from Anthropic’s illegal downloads of pirated works. Another lawsuit filed by a group of authors that included Sarah Silverman, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Richard Kadrey, was brought against Meta on similar grounds. The plaintiffs argued that AIs trained by copyrighted works undercut the authors’ ability to negotiate other book deals. The judge in that case sided with Meta on the grounds that the plaintiffs “made the wrong arguments.” The judge said it would be hard to defend fair use for “a tool to make billions or trillions of dollars while enabling the creation of a potentially endless stream of competing works,” but concluded that the plaintiffs chose a bad argument, because Meta’s AI did not reproduce enough text from the authors’ books to constitute plagiarism or piracy.
In an unexpected reversal, the Senate has voted to kill an AI-law moratorium, which would have blocked states from regulating artificial intelligence for the next decade, the Washington Post reports.
Lauren Groff has announced her next book will be a short story collection called Brawler, to be published by Riverhead Books on February 24, 2026, Elle reports. Brawler is Groff’s first collection since 2018 and jumps from Florida to California to New England and beyond. The cast of characters includes a mother and her children attempting to escape from an abusive husband; a young woman newly responsible for a disabled sibling; and a group of classmates gathering to say goodbye to their dying friend; among many others. Each story touches on, as Groff puts it, “the violence that lurks within familial spaces,” which reverberate within the “larger moments of cultural violence that I think we’ve been in for a very long time.”
Noah Hawley writes for the Atlantic about how Kurt Vonnegut processed the violence and randomness of war in his 1963 novel, Cat’s Cradle. Vonnegut, who served in the U.S. Army during World War II, considered survival a “kind of cosmic joke,” Hawley writes, “with death being the setup and life being the punch line.”
An exhibition celebrating Jane Austen acknowledges the author’s unenthusiastic relationship to Bath, the English city where she lived from 1801 to 1806, the Guardian reports. The exhibition, which is titled The Most Tiresome Place in the World: Jane Austen & Bath, will open at the No. 1 Royal Crescent in Bath on July 5. The exhibition’s title is taken from a conversation between Henry Tilney and Catherine Morland in Austen’s 1817 novel, Northanger Abbey. Tilney says, “For six weeks, I allow Bath is pleasant enough; but beyond that, it is the most tiresome place in the world.”
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG) has announced its plans to relaunch North Point Press, Publishers Weekly reports. North Point Press was originally founded in Berkeley, California in 1978 by William Turnbull and Jack Shoemaker to publish literary fiction and nonfiction. The press closed in 1990, and FSG acquired its publishing assets in 1992. Catherine Tung will oversee the relaunch of the press as senior editor. North Point will cover categories including ecology, natural history, environmental science, personal growth, psychology, spirituality, food, design, and health.
A group of more than seventy authors including Dennis Lehane, Gregory Maguire, and Lauren Groff released an open letter published on Literary Hub about the use of AI, NPR reports. The letter was addressed to the big five U.S. publishers along with “other publishers of America,” and asked the companies to promise that “they will never release books that were created by machines.” The letter—which also included requests to refrain from replacing publishing house employees with AI tools and to only hire human audiobook narrators—garnered more than a thousand signatures in less than a day.
Joseph Bernstein writes for the New York Times about why men have stopped reading fiction and considers efforts by book clubs, publishers, and booksellers to combat the trend. Bernstein writes, “for men to read more fiction as the world of the novel exists today would not just require more stereotypically masculine subject matter. It might be a matter of men approaching their reading lives a little more like women do—getting recommendations online from celebrities and influencers, browsing together, forming book clubs.”
Kyle Chayka writes for the New Yorker about recent studies that demonstrate how AI is homogenizing our thoughts and writing. One study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that people who used ChatGPT to write an essay demonstrated less brain activity than those who did not. Another finding was that the texts produced by AI converged around common words and ideas. “A.I. is a technology of averages,” Chayka writes, “large language models are trained to spot patterns across vast tracts of data; the answers they produce tend toward consensus, both in the quality of the writing, which is often riddled with clichés and banalities, and in the calibre of the ideas.”
Clare Mulroy writes for USA Today about Julia Whelan—a voice actor narrating the audiobooks for a range of best-selling contemporary novels. Whelan has narrated Atmosphere (Ballantine Books, 2025) by Taylor Jenkins Reid, Great Big Beautiful Life (Berkley, 2025) by Emily Henry, and Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil (Tor Books, 2025) by V. E. Schwab, among other titles. Whelan discusses her path to narrating dozens of books per year, the threat of AI encroaching on the audiobook industry, and Audiobrary, the audio platform she founded that applies publishing models with royalties to both narrators and authors.
The Supreme Court has ruled that parents can opt their children out of classes using LGBTQ+ books on religious grounds, Publishers Lunch reports.
James Hill writes for the New York Times about the Parisian Atelier Devauchelle, where bookbinding is a communal art. The women who run the atelier sew and create new bindings, restore torn pages of books, and create slipcovers and special boxes to conserve fragile editions. The workshop is located near Drouot, an auction house that sells antiquarian books.
The Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) has announced the 2025 CLMP Firecracker Awards—annual prizes that celebrate the work of independent literary publishers. Obligations to the Wounded (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024) by Mubanga Kalimamukwento won the prize in fiction, Low: Notes on Art & Trash (Fonograf Editions, 2024) by Jaydra Johnson won the prize in creative nonfiction, and Mirror Nation (Wave Books, 2024) by Don Mee Choi won the prize in poetry. Each winner in the book categories receives $2,000 to be split evenly between the press and the author. Revel, a biannual magazine based in Atlanta, won the award for best debut magazine, and Circumference, a biannual journal founded in 2020, won the award for general excellence in magazines. Each winner in the magazine categories receive $1,000.
Alex Reisner writes for the Atlantic about how tech companies developing LLMs pose “an existential threat to the media, and to the livelihood of journalists everywhere.” Reisner writes that chatbots “have proved adept at keeping users locked into conversations...by answering every question, often through summarizing articles from news publishers,” and cites one study that found Google’s AI overviews have reduced traffic to outside websites by more than 34 percent.
Though bookseller James Daunt has received widespread praise for rehabilitating Barnes & Noble (B&N) since he was named CEO in 2019, many independent publishers are frustrated with how little attention B&N has paid to their lists, Publishers Weekly reports. Nearly every one of the dozen independent presses Publishers Weekly interviewed said that their business with B&N has dropped significantly since Daunt took over, though all the indies emphasized they are glad B&N is in business. As one nonfiction publisher said, “Daunt’s entitled to running his business as he sees fit. Opening more stores is good. Sales being up is good. What he is doing is working—it’s just not working for us.”
A group of authors including Jonathan Alter, Mary Bly, and Jia Tolentino has filed a lawsuit against Microsoft, arguing that the tech company used the Books3 pirate database of almost 200,000 books to train its LLM, and knowingly infringed on copyrighted material, Publishers Lunch reports.
Jenny Singer writes for the Washington Post about the BookTok phenomenon of the “book boyfriend,” as romance book sales continue to soar. The term refers to characters “who seem to have stridden, galloped, or brooded onto the page from somewhere in the recesses of the reader’s deepest desires,” Singer writes. “Simply put, a book boyfriend is a character you can’t stop thinking about—and longing for—beyond the page.” Singer notes the history of idealized and problematic book boyfriends, adding that the trend even existed in 1848 when “a literary magazine reported that ‘New England states were visited by a distressing mental epidemic, passing under the name of the Jane Eyre fever.’”
In Bartz v. Anthropic, a federal judge in California has ruled that AI training constitutes fair use when using legally acquired copyrighted books but violates copyright law when downloading pirated copies for permanent storage, Publishers Weekly reports. In a statement responding to the ruling, the Authors Guild said: “While the Authors Guild is relieved that the court recognized Anthropic’s massive, criminal-level, unexcused e-book piracy for what it is, the decision that using pirated or scanned books for training LLMs is fair use” contradicts copyright law and “ignores the harm caused to authors and the value of their works due to market saturation by LLM-generated content that competes with human authors.”
In the Poets on Translation series in Poetry, Heather Green writes about translating the work of Tristan Tzara and “using new sounds to root a poem in a partially shared soil of linguistic meaning.”
Meg LaBorde Kuehn, the publisher and CEO of Kirkus Reviews, is leaving the company, effective July 11, Shelf Awareness reports. Judy Hottensen, who stepped down as vice president and associate publisher of Grove/Atlantic on January 1, will serve as interim CEO.
To celebrate the centennial of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald scholars and fans joined a boat tour around Manhasset Bay that shows how little the place has changed since 1925, the New York Times reports.
A Russian missile and drone attack on Kyiv on June 17 destroyed Ukrainian Priority Publishing, a Ukrainian publishing house, Publishers Weekly reports. The attack, which killed twenty-eight people, came just after the thirteenth International Book Arsenal Festival was held in Kyiv. The literary festival attracted thirty thousand attendees, including over a hundred publishers and six bookstores.
Digital audiobook sales, which have been the primary driver of sales since Spotify entered the market in November 2023, sank in April, Publishers Weekly reports. Total revenue across 1,325 publishers saw a 4 percent overall decline compared to April 2024 due, in part, to a 12.5 percent drop in digital audiobook sales across both the adult and children’s/YA categories. Adult trade fiction digital audio sales dropped 9 percent in April, and adult nonfiction digital audio sales dropped 17.6 percent.
Citing the recently published book Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship (Amistad, 2025) by Dana A. Williams, Clint Smith writes for the Atlantic about how Toni Morrison transformed publishing as an editor at Random House. Smith writes: “How Morrison handled the pressures of wielding her one-of-a-kind influence is fascinating—and, in retrospect, telling: As an editor, she was not just tenacious, but also always aware of how tenuous progress in the field could be…. Morrison’s mode was to be relentlessly demanding—of herself, her authors, and her Random House colleagues. She tailored her rigorous style to the varied array of Black writers she didn’t hesitate to pitch to her bosses.”
A new prize for translated poetry has been launched by Fitzcarraldo Editions, Giramondo Publishing, and New Directions, the Guardian reports. The biennial Poetry in Translation Prize will award an advance of $5,000 to be shared equally between the poet and translator. The winning collection will be published in the U.K. and Ireland by Fitzcarraldo Editions, in Australia and New Zealand by Giramondo, and in North America by New Directions. Submissions are open from July 15 to August 15 to poets writing in any language other than English. The winner will be announced in January 2026 and publication of the winning collection is scheduled for 2027.
NetGalley has launched a consumer marketing platform called Booktrovert, Publishers Weekly reports. Booktrovert will offer e-book giveaways, reader activities, promotional and preorder campaigns, purchase links, and more. The platform will target general readers as opposed to industry professionals. Publishers will be able to create campaigns through a self-service interface within their NetGalley accounts and receive customer analytics and demographic data.
Authors are posting videos of themselves editing their manuscripts on TikTok to refute allegations that they are using generative AI and to bring readers into the drafting process, Alana Yzola reports for Wired. “The publishing market is expected to grow by $18.9 million between now and 2029, according to market research firm Technavio, partially due to an influx of self-published authors,” Yzola writes. “But with scammy rewrites and digitally fabricated authors entering the market, artificial intelligence has made searching for human-made content more difficult, causing independent authors to combat what some are calling an AI-generated ‘witch hunt.’”
BookTok has had multiple controversies in the last month: accusations of plagiarism, AI use, and author bullying, NBC News reports. Beverly, a romance novel by author Laura J. Robert, had been gaining traction on BookTok, but many content creators removed their positive endorsements of the book after allegations that Robert had plagiarized R.J. Lewis’s 2016 title, Obsessed. The author Victoria Aveyard recently posted a video alluding to another author using generative AI in a novel but did not name the writer. And Author Ali Hazelwood was cyberbullied after making a comment about who Katniss Everdeen, the protagonist of the Hunger Games series, should have ended up with romantically.
Five years after it was discontinued along with the industry trade show BookExpo, BookCon will return to New York City’s Javits Center next April, according to ReedPop, a boutique arm of events organizer Reed Exhibitions. Jim Milliot of Publishers Weekly reports that Jenny Martin, “who headed up the earlier iteration of BookCon as well as BookExpo,” will serve as event director. Milliot writes: “Martin stressed that the revived event will bear no resemblance to BookExpo, an industry trade show, saying that the BookCon team is ‘focused wholly on delivering a consumer event.’”
PEN America has compiled “A Travel Ban Reading List” that includes more than fifty titles “by authors with ties to the 19 countries affected by President Trump’s travel ban.” Sabir Sultan, director of the World Voices Festival and Literary Programs at PEN America, writes, “Writers record their ideas, their fantasies, and mirror our collective realities. Through engaging with books we learn about ourselves and the world. We see clearer the complex tapestry of people, histories, and national borders that shape our daily lives. We are inspired to see new possibilities. Let this list inspire you to read and explore.”
A book publisher that was launched in 2023 to take advantage of the success of #BookTok, appears to be closing, the Bookseller reports. 8th Note Press, which is owned by Chinese tech company ByteDance, had acquired the rights to more than thirty novels and also announced a print publishing arm in partnership with Zando, the independent publishing company that recently acquired Tin House. However, Matilda Battersby of the Bookseller writes, “[A]uthors and agents are currently negotiating the return of rights to titles acquired by the publisher, and the business’ digital presence has apparently been quietly deleted.”
Sourcebooks, the sixth-largest book publisher in the United States, made the list of the Best Workplaces of 2025, according to Inc. magazine, whose editors took into account “benefits, growth opportunities, and team values,” among other qualities, to compile the list.
Clare Mulroy writes for USA Today about how the Trump administration could change the way we read—from book bans to border policies and anti-DEI efforts that affect authors. Mulroy describes authors who, shaken by new immigration and border policies, are canceling tours and events in the U.S., budget cuts that have affected libraries and other public humanities programs, and legal actions that permit educational censorship and book bans.
The writer Henrique Alvarellos has overseen the reproduction of a groundbreaking book of Federico García Lorca’s homoerotic sonnets, the Guardian reports. In 1983, dozens of selected readers received the first edition of the Sonnets of Dark Love, a red booklet of poems penned by Lorca fifty years earlier. The people behind the publication never revealed their identities. But their plan to pressure Lorca’s family into releasing the poet’s sonnets in the original Spanish worked. A year after the secret publication, which was sent to Lorca experts, cultural figures, and journalists, Lorca’s family consented to the publication of all the sonnets. To commemorate the anonymous project, Alvarellos has produced a facsimile edition of that 1983 booklet.
Joshua Rothman writes for the New Yorker about how AI may bring the age of traditional reading to an end. He traces a history through various technological developments like e-books and audio narration, writing, “The old-fashioned, ideal sort of reading—intense, extended, beginning-to-end encounters with carefully crafted texts—has become almost anachronistic.” Rothman wonders, “What will happen to reading culture as reading becomes automated?” In such a world, he writes, “It will be difficult to separate the deep readers from the superficial ones…. Text may get treated like a transitional medium, a temporary resting place for ideas.”
Kelly Jensen writes for Book Riot about the Government Accountability Office’s conclusion that Trump overstepped his authority by dismantling the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS). The Government Accountability Office, an independent, nonpartisan agency of the U.S. legislative branch that audits the federal government, found that the Trump administration violated the 1974 Impound Control Act (ICA), a tool of federal checks and balances that requires the president to execute legislation that Congress passes. Violations of the ICA are liable to legal action by the U.S. Comptroller General.
Katya Zimmer writes for the BBC about the trend of people turning to “creative bibliotherapy”—tailored reading recommendations with the goal of improving mental health. Zimmer cites studies that find immersion in great literature can “help relieve, restore, and reinvigorate the troubled mind—and can play a part in relieving stress and anxiety,” but she also concedes that “the evidence that reading helps mental health is complicated.” Though readers tend to be less stressed, depressed, and lonely than non-readers, it is unclear if reading fiction improves well-being, or if people with better well-being are the ones reading fiction in the first place. What is more, some research points to the fact that books can actually trigger readers with the same addictions as the characters they are reading about. Yet another study found that people with depression reported better mental health after attending reading groups for poetry and fiction.
Daniel Gumnit has been appointed executive director and CEO of Little Free Library, a nonprofit organization that is based in Saint Paul and dedicated to expanding book access, Publishers Weekly reports. Gumnit has previously served in leadership roles at nonprofits such as People Serving People, Twin Cities PBS National Productions, Children’s Cancer Research Fund, and most recently, Minnesota Alliance with Youth. In a statement, Gumnit said, “Our work—providing 24/7 book access; granting Little Free Libraries to underserved urban, rural, and Indigenous communities; and championing diverse books—has never been more urgent.”
Ellen Oh reflects on the tenth anniversary of We Need Diverse Books in an interview with Publishers Weekly. She discusses the organization’s advocacy for sustainable diversity in all parts of the publishing industry, book banning, and the Trump administration’s assault on DEI initiatives, among other topics.
The New York Public Library has announced Alexander Sammartino as the winner of the twenty-fifth annual Young Lions Fiction Award for his book Last Acts (Simon & Schuster). Sammartino will receive $10,000.
Keith Woodhouse writes about an emerging literary subgenre he calls “climate assessment dramas,” Stephen Markley’s The Deluge (Simon & Schuster, 2023), and the future of climate fiction for Public Books. “Narrativizing climate change means writing about environmental catastrophe in a way that cuts against the grain of established environmental commitments,” he writes, “it means imagining unprecedented political dynamics from within the limits of our own political moment, and it means describing a near-totalizing phenomenon through what is inevitably a narrow aperture.”
