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A press release from Folio Literary Management has announced the agency’s acquisition of the Greenhouse Literary Agency from Coolabi Group. Folio describes the move as “expanding Folio’s children’s division and reinforcing its commitment to representing exceptional children’s book authors and illustrators.” Greenhouse’s full backlist and client list will transfer to Folio, as will current Greenhouse staff. “We are thrilled to be moving from strength to strength and look forward with excitement to what the future holds for our clients’ careers at Folio Jr,.” says Chelsea Eberly, who will join Folio as vice president, transitioning from her role as director at Greenhouse.

A new deadline has been set for writers to opt-out or make objections in the lawsuit being brought against AI corporation Anthropic, Publishers Lunch reports. Judge Araceli Martinez-Oluguin has extended the deadline from January 7 to the revised deadline of January 29, allowing writers more time to exclude themselves from the class-action case and pursue different legal recourse. “This is the only option that allows you to bring your own separate lawsuit against Anthropic for the claims this Settlement resolves.”

The woman fatally shot by an ICE officer in Minneapolis yesterday has been identified as prize-winning poet Renee Nicole Good, the BBC reports. A mother of three, Good studied creative writing at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, and won a prize from the Academy of American Poets for her poem “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs” in 2020. Old Dominion University’s president, Brian Hemphill, wrote, “May Renee’s life be a reminder of what unites us: freedom, love, and peace.”

With book distributor Baker & Taylor set for “imminent closure,” NPR considers the consequences for libraries nationwide. “For nearly two hundred years, Baker & Taylor has played a key role in getting books from manufacturers to warehouses to library patrons’ hands. Partnering with more than 5,000 U.S. libraries, the company has been a staple in the industry, selling books at wholesale prices and providing them with labels and lamination so libraries don’t have to.” Librarians report lags of weeks or months in receiving new titles as Baker & Taylor concludes its services and their libraries set up new accounts with other distributors.

On behalf of the Kurt Vonnegurt Estate and together with the ACLU, three authors and two anonymous high school students are challenging provisions of Utah House Bill 29, the 2024 law that prohibits materials deemed “pornographic or indecent” from public schools, Publishers Weekly reports. Jason M. Groth, legal director for ACLU of Utah, sees the ban as particularly insidious for the way it sets up a single ban to trigger a snowballing effect: “Just three school districts can trigger a statewide ban, ensuring more authors and more books are swept up. We are moving forward now with a strong case to protect the First Amendment rights of an impressive group of authors and students.”

Publishers Weekly reports on supply-chain disruptions that have marred what was otherwise a strong holiday sales season at independent bookstores across the country. Many booksellers expressed frustration over “unexpected shipping delays of two weeks and more on shipments from Ingram, the Big Five, and other major publishers throughout December.” 

Harlequin France, a division of HarperCollins, has started implementing AI translation tools, reports Literary Hub. According to a letter published on the French Literary Translators Association’s website in December, the publisher has contacted their translators to inform them that their contracts will be ending ASAP. Instead, Harlequin has employed Fluent Planet, a communications agency using machine translation software. A spokesperson from Fluent Planet stated that their hybrid model joins “in-house language assistance tools with systematic human translation carried out by professional literary translators,” such that “freelance proofreaders” will review the results of the machine translations.  

The American Library Association recently announced that a division of their organization, the Public Library Association (PLA), has launched the Transformative Technology Task Force “to advise...on the evolving role and impacts of transformative technology on library work and to identify and recommend priority training topics relevant to public library staff and users.” More specifically, the task force, which began work in November of last year, will be focusing on artificial intelligence for the first two years. PLA President Dr. Brandy McNeil remarks that the association “has assembled a powerhouse group to help shape how public libraries approach innovation, ethics, and the opportunities of an AI-powered world.” The task force consists of nine PLA members. 

Earlier this week six authors filed new individual copyright infringement actions against Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, xAI, and Perplexity AI, Publishers Weekly reports. “The suits, which were filed in the Northern District of California, states the companies copied authors' books from well-known pirate libraries—including LibGen, Z-Library, and OceanofPDF—to train their large language models without permission, licensing, or compensation.” The six authors, including two-time Pulitzer Prize winner John Carreyrou, opted out of the $1.5 billion settlement of the lawsuit against Anthropic. “The new filing states that the settlement, which would provide $3,000 to authors and/or publishers, is not enough.” Instead, the plaintiffs are seeking $150,000 in statutory damages for each work against each defendant, or a total of $900,000 per work.

Barnes & Noble plans to open sixty new locations across the United States in 2026, USA Today reports. “While the details are still ‘being worked out’ as far as locations and grand opening dates, the expansion follows a period of ‘strong sales’ in existing stores, Barnes & Noble confirmed.”

The U.S. Senate has confirmed Mary Anne Carter as the Chairman of the National Endowments of the Arts (NEA), according to a press release from the organization. Carter serves as the 14th leader of the NEA, returning to the role after leading the organization during the first Trump presidential term. “The arts are essential to creating, innovating, healing, and recovery, and they provide vital economic stability to communities across the nation,” said Carter in a statement on her appointment. “I look forward to the many celebrations that will take place in 2026 in honor of America’s 250th anniversary, as well as to the agency’s continued research into the powerful role the arts play in healing—from illness to trauma to natural disasters.” 

Conservative public interest law firm America First Legal filed a federal civil rights complaint against Penguin Random House (PRH) on December 16 with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission demanding there be an investigation into “apparent race- and sex-based discrimination in its hiring, promotion, and workforce development practices,” Publishers Weekly reports. PRH is the latest company to be targeted by the law firm, following Nike, Disney, and Mattel for their DEI policies. A spokesperson for PRH stated, “We are proud of our talented team of professionals and are confident that our employment practices comply with all applicable laws.”

Throughout this week, the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) has announced the longlists for their annual awards across the six categories of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, biography, autobiography, and criticism. This marks the second year in a row that the NBCC has shared their longlists since they began operating in 1974. The organization, which is comprised of over 700 book review editors and critics nationwide, also awards the “John Leonard Prize for the best first book in any genre; the Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize, for the best book of any genre translated into English and published in the United States; the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing; and the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award and Toni Morrison Achievement Award.”

“This year’s library news featured as many plot twists and cliffhangers as a Dan Brown novel,” Publishers Weekly reports as it reflects on a year of book bans, federal funding upheavels, and questions about the place of artificial intelligence in the library. Other notable stories include the May firing of Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden and the closing of Baker & Taylor, the country’s largest library wholesaler.

The Poetry Foundation is facing protests from employees, poets, and others in the literary community after the organization announced on December 1 that it was phasing out all public programming beginning in the new year, Publishers Weekly reports. Poetry Foundation staff say the decision “would result in substantial layoffs and a loss of support for the poets who are paid to read and present at events.” On December 15, members of the community also “published a letter they sent to the foundation’s senior leadership team earlier this month asking for them to retain the jobs of two longtime employees, Shoshana Olidort and Maggie Queeney, who are set to be laid off on December 31. In the letter, which is now open to the public for signatures, the employees urged the foundation to reconsider its decision in light of its responsibility to ‘mitigate harm to poetry and to the arts and education more broadly’ at a moment of ‘extreme political and economic turmoil.’”

The National Book Critics Circle has announced the longlist for the NBCC Award in Fiction: The Antidote (Knopf) by Karen Russell; Audition (Riverhead) by Katie Kitamura; The Book of Records(Norton) by Madeleine Thien; Heart the Lover (Grove) by Lily King, Long Distance (Bloomsbury) by Ayşegül Savaş; On the Calculation of Volume (Book III) (New Directions) by Solvej Balle, translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell; Sea, Poison (New Directions) by Caren Beilin; The South (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Tash Aw; We Do Not Part (Hogarth) by Han Kang, translated from the Korean by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris; and The Wilderness (Mariner) by Angela Flournoy.

Haruki Murakami last week received two awards in New York City that honor for his career as an author, translator, critic, the Associated Press reports. “On Tuesday night, the Center for Fiction presented him its Lifetime of Excellence in Fiction Award, previously given to Nobel laureates Toni Morrison and Kazuo Ishiguro among others. Two days later, the Japan Society cohosted a jazzy tribute at The Town Hall, “Murakami Mixtape,” and awarded him its annual prize for ‘luminous individuals (including Yoko Ono and Caroline Kennedy) who have brought the U.S. and Japan closer together.’”