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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.
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.”
Nearly a million books in 254 languages from Harvard University’s library and troves of old newspapers and materials held by the Boston Public Library are being released to tech companies for AI training, the Associated Press reports. Jessica Chapel, the chief of digital and online services at the Boston Public Library, said, “OpenAI had this interest in massive amounts of training data. We have an interest in massive amounts of digital objects. So this is kind of just a case that things are aligning.” Digitizing is expensive, and tech companies can essentially fund projects librarians want to pursue anyway while benefiting from scores of valuable data.
Yael van der Wouden has won this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction for her novel, The Safekeep (Penguin, 2024), the Guardian reports. The nonfiction award went to Rachel Clarke’s The Story of a Heart: Two Families, One Heart, and the Medical Miracle That Saved a Child’s Life (Little, Brown, 2024). Each author received £30,000 (approximately $40,742).
Parul Sehgal writes for the New York Times about biography and how the genre might withstand the threats AI poses to the literary world. “Where biography is a form built on the vagaries of human experience,” Sehgal writes, “artificial intelligence offers a form of knowledge stripped of experience.” She adds: “Even the boosters of AI readily concede its poor grasp of character or human motive, which is notoriously coiled, cloudy, contradictory. To understand motive requires some sense of the raw matter of experience, of its quiddity, of the body’s way of knowing and remembering.”
The literary journal Lapham’s Quarterly is now attached to Bard College and will begin its revival with a website and podcast, Alexandra Alter reports for the New York Times. The journal is relaunching its digital presence and audio content under the editorial direction of writers Donovan Hohn and Francine Prose. Lewis Lapham, who founded the journal in 2007, died in 2024. Toward the end of his life, it was unclear if the journal would survive him—the journal was struggling financially, furloughed its staff, and stopped publishing issues. Lapham’s Quarterly’s “survival is all the more remarkable at a time when many literary journals are struggling,” Alter writes, especially due to new funding challenges presented by the Trump administration’s budget cuts to the NEA.
Danielle Ofri writes for the New Yorker about why doctors write, and explores the history, ethics, and motivations of doctor-writing. Though physicians “write all day, every day—progress notes, consultations, assessments, referrals, appeal letters,” Ofri explains, “We write at a remove, cordoning off our inner world behind a cool clinical eye and protective professional jargon.” She adds: “Doctoring provides powerful tools for getting under the hood, but writing offers ones that dig into the interstitial spaces where our more utilitarian tools falter. And this might reveal an even deeper aspect to writing—an element of purely being human.”
The New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is celebrating its hundredth anniversary at a moment when Black history is under attack, the New York Times reports. The Schomburg Centennial Festival will take place on June 14, feature various literary and cultural events, and culminate with an outdoor block party and a performance by Slick Rick. The anniversary comes as the Trump Administration continues to attack diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and decimate federal funding for libraries, museums, and arts organizations in service of what Trump calls patriotic history.
The twelve board members of the Fulbright program have resigned after accusing Trump aides of political interference, the New York Times reports. The board members expressed concern that new appointees at the State Department, which manages the scholarship program, took illegal action by canceling awards to nearly two hundred American professors and researchers.
Everand, the online e-book and audiobook subscription service subsidiary of Scribd, has acquired the online book club platform Fable, Publishers Weekly reports. All Fable employees will join Scribd, with Tony Grimminck, CEO of Scribd, taking over as the CEO of Fable, and Padmasree Warrior, Fable’s founder, moving into an advisory role.
Elisa Gabbert writes for the New York Times about the joy of reading one poem in many different translations. Gabbert writes, “I love to see how different minds find (hugely or minutely) different solutions to the same set of problems.”
Children’s reading enjoyment in the U.K. has fallen to the lowest recorded level in two decades, the Guardian reports. The decline is particularly evident in teenage boys. Of girls aged eight to eighteen, 39.1 percent said they enjoyed reading in their free time, compared to 25.7 percent of boys. Only one in three children aged eight to eighteen reported enjoying reading “very much” or “quite a lot” this year. The number of children that reported reading something daily in their free time has halved in the last twenty years, from 38.1 percent to 18.7 percent.
Conduit Books & Ephemera, which was founded in 1993, is pursuing legal action against Conduit, a new press “focusing initially on male authors,” for infringing upon their trademarked name.
A federal judge has denied a preliminary injunction in American Library Association v. Sonderling, a lawsuit that seeks to stop the destruction of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Publishers Weekly reports. The court’s decision rested on an interpretation of the case that prioritized contractual issues over constitutional ones.
Lambda Literary, the nation’s leading organization championing LGBTQ+ literature, has named Jozie (J. Clapp) Clapp as its new executive director. The former executive director of the LGBTQ Center of Durham in North Carolina, J. Clapp has worked in leadership positions for over a decade in nonprofits, fundraising and advocating for LGBTQ+ communities, especially BIPOC and transgender individuals. J. Clapp said, “It’s an incredible honor to lead this next chapter, ensuring LGBTQ+ literature continues to thrive and reflect our rich, diverse communities.”
Pauline McLean writes for the BBC about the Victorian bookbinders who used arsenic, as well as mercury and chrome, to make striking green covers for books. Prolonged exposure to these books, which are stored in archives around the world, can cause low-level arsenic poisoning. The Poison Book Project, a collaboration in Delaware between the Winterthur Museum and the state university, compiled a list of titles that could harm humans. Inspired by this initiative, Erica Kotze, a preservative conservator at the University of St. Andrews, and Pilar Gil, a biochemist, developed a technology to examine thousands of historic books. The affordable testing device is designed to flash red when detecting toxic elements. The device will allow librarians and conservators to identify toxic books, safely store them, and still enjoy controlled access.
Carla Hayden, the former Librarian of Congress, speaks out about her dismissal by Trump with CBS News. When reflecting on the efforts of the Trump administration to push out leaders and enforce budget cuts at cultural institutions, she says, “it’s part of a larger-seeming effort to diminish opportunities for the general public to have free access to information and inspiration.” She adds: “We like to say as librarians, ‘Free people read freely.’ And so, there’s been an effort recently to quelch that.”
Sam Dolnick writes for the New York Times about the author James Frey and his relationship to art, truth, and public shaming after the scandal that followed the fabrication of some facts in his memoir A Million Little Pieces (Doubleday, 2003). Frey says he was “working in autofiction before that word existed.” This month he is publishing a novel called Next to Heaven (Authors Equity) about a swingers party and a murder.
Salman Rushdie said he has moved on from the knife attack that threatened his life in 2022, the BBC reports. At this year’s Hay Festival in Wales, Rushdie said, “It will be nice to talk about fiction again because ever since the attack, really the only thing anybody’s wanted to talk about is the attack, but I’m over it.” When asked about AI’s impact on authors, Rushdie said, “I don’t have Chat GPT,” adding, “I try very hard to pretend it doesn’t exist.”
Librarians, teachers, bookstore owners, and other activists have planned a day of action on June 7 to fight book bans and preserve history, USA Today reports. Teach Truth Day of Action will include around a hundred events across the country, such as film screenings, protest marches, and community readings.
Due to soft sales and diminished funding, the New Press has reduced its number of employees by about nine—from a staff of under thirty members to one of under twenty, Publishers Weekly reports. Cofounder and executive director Diane Wachtell said she attributed the decline in sales to the increased banning of mostly progressive books under Trump’s administration, and a lack of a sales uptick for books that explain what is happening in the United States today. “It looks like, at least for now, readers are turning to escapist books rather than to books that try to explain what is happening,” she said.
Book of the Month Club (BOMC), which chose James Frey’s novel Next to Heaven (Authors Equity, 2025) as an upcoming selection, has responded to criticism about Frey’s prior comments on AI, Publishers Lunch reports. In a 2023 interview, Frey said that he was using generative AI in the writing of his work. BOMC has addressed the controversy, writing, “it is our belief that in today’s technology environment, there is always a chance that sentences or grammar were edited or revised with the use of AI tools somewhere in the creation process,” and added that the “use of AI is a complex and evolving topic in the publishing industry, and we’re monitoring it closely.” BOMC decided not to revoke the selection and instead encouraged members to make their own decisions about whether to read Frey’s novel.
Cal Newport writes for the New Yorker about what Isaac Asimov’s science fiction reveals about living with AI today. In I, Robot (Gnome Press, 1950), Asimov articulates three laws of robotics designed to protect human beings from harm. “But” Newport writes, “we can more deeply appreciate the difficulties in taming AI” by remembering that “Asimov himself portrayed his laws as imperfect; as the book continues, they create numerous unexpected corner cases and messy ambiguities, which lead to unnerving scenarios.”
At the fifth annual U.S. Book Show on June 3, experts from nearly all sections of the publishing business discussed the changes AI is bringing to the industry, Publishers Weekly reports. Panel topics included helping authors with commercial potential build networks and achieve greater success, supporting human narrators while AI voiceovers are on the rise, and the importance of fostering human-translated literature.
Writers and artists remember the author Edmund White in the New York Times. The colleagues, friends, and admirers who contributed reflections include Andrew Sean Greer, Yiyun Li, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Alexander Chee, among others.
Jason Wilson writes for the Guardian about how the far right is trying to spread its ideology through the publishing world. The dissemination of far-right material is being led by publishers including Passage Press and Ark Press, and illustrates the Trump administration’s larger attack on what it sees as liberal culture.
Edmund White, an author who documented and imagined the gay revolution through journalism, essays, plays, and novels, has died at age eighty-five, the Associated Press reports. White is known for famous works such as A Boy’s Own Story (Dutton, 1982) and The Beautiful Room Is Empty (Knopf, 1988). An activist and professor, White was among the founders of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, an organization that advocated for AIDS prevention and awareness. In 2019, White received a National Book Award for lifetime achievement.
Bernardine Evaristo has received an outstanding contribution award to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the BBC reports. Evaristo will receive £100,000 (approximately $135,738) at an awards ceremony in London on June 12. Evaristo said she was “astonished” to receive the award and that she would donate the prize money to support other women writers.
Penguin Random House has acquired Wonderbly, one of the U.K.’s fastest-growing independent publishers and an international leader in personalized gift books, the Bookseller reports.
Audiobook sales rose 13 percent in 2024, to $2.2 billion, according to a sales survey released by the Audio Publishers Association (APA), Publishers Weekly reports. The APA’s consumer survey found that of 1,700 Americans aged eighteen or older, 51 percent have listened to an audiobook. The number of non-listeners who said they are interested in listening to an audiobook rose from 32 percent in 2023 to 38 percent in 2025. While the production of AI-narrated audiobooks has increased, consumer willingness to try AI-narrated audiobooks dropped year over year, from 77 percent in 2023, to 70 percent in 2025.
One of the scheduled exhibitions for 2026 at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City features drawings by the poet John Ashbery, Fine Books & Collections reports. The show also includes drawings that were gifts to the poet from his friends—artists such as James Bishop, Joe Brainard, Jane Freilicher, Jean Hélion, Fairfield Porter, and Larry Rivers. The selection features eight portraits of Ashbery and one of the first collages Ashbery ever created. The exhibition will also display books that show Ashbery’s collaboration with artists.
The Center for Fiction has recognized its workers’ union after a supermajority of eligible employees filed for election with the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union, Publishers Lunch reports. The union will cover approximately twenty-five roles, including booksellers, baristas, administrators, event coordinators, and development and grants assistants. The union will now begin negotiations with management over contract terms.
Adelle Waldman writes for the New Yorker about Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen and argues that the novel is Austen’s most underappreciated work. Austen wrote the novel in her early twenties between 1798 and 1799. She sold the manuscript in 1803, but it ultimately wasn’t published until after she died. Northanger Abbey is “a novel about novels,” Waldman writes, “deriving much of its energy and humor from mocking the tropes of the sentimental novel of the eighteenth century—particularly the convention of endowing protagonists with extraordinary personal qualities and heartrending histories.”
The 2026 federal budget proposal shutters the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), Book Riot reports. Despite court rulings that the White House cannot do further damage to the IMLS, these legal decisions will be moot if the agency is simply defunded. According to Trump’s budget, the IMLS, which is under .005 percent of the overall federal budget, would find its funding reduced from $313 million to $6 million beginning on October 1. Congress also needs to reauthorize the Museum and Library Services Act of 2018 by September 30, or the IMLS will no longer be active.
After the NEA terminated dozens of grants last month amounting to a total of $1.2 million, fifty-one independent presses and literary organizations have been left to cover immediate deficits and wonder about the future of the literary arts, Publishers Weekly reports. Beyond the material losses of the NEA grants, many publishers said that the NEA offers prestige that leads to other funding. The NEA is the only organization that funds the literary arts in all fifty states. In its absence, nonprofit publishers are looking to cities, philanthropic organizations, and crowdfunding campaigns as they reassess their budgets and operations.
Alexandra Alter writes for the New York Times about Molly Jong-Fast’s new memoir, How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir (Viking), about life with her famous mother, Erica Jong, and her mother’s decline. Erica Jong, who is now eighty-three and diagnosed with dementia, often repurposed details and stories from her daughter’s life into memoirs and novels. Jong-Fast naturally sometimes resented the use of her experiences as literary fodder. Alter writes that Jong-Fast’s memoir “reads like a score-settling marathon at times, but also like a loving elegy.”
The history of unconventional publishing is being traced in a new exhibition at the Senate House Library in London called Spineless Wonders: The Power of Print Unbound, Fine Books & Collections reports. The show, which is curated by Tansy Barton, Christos Fotelis, and Leila Kassir, will run from June 17 until November 15 and span five centuries of printed materials. The exhibition includes English Civil War pamphlets, insights into fortune tellers’ tricks, and queer and feminist explorations, among other items.
Shira Perlmutter, the former register of copyrights, lost her first lawsuit to convince a federal judge that “her dismissal by the White House on May 10 was illegal and that the executive branch overstepped in ordering it,” Publishers Weekly reports. On May 29, Perlmutter’s attorneys filed new documents with the court and petitioned for expedited judgment—continuing their argument that her dismissal violates both constitutional and statutory rights.
Liv Little writes about this year’s Calabash International Literary Festival for the Guardian. Founded in 2001, the Jamaican book event celebrates the island’s enormous cultural footprint and features readings, discussions, and DJs. This year’s lineup of authors included Marlon James, Ian McEwan, Sheryl Lee Ralph, and Safiya Sinclair.
The Book Manufacturers Institute (BMI), a trade association for book printers and their suppliers in North America, is joining the fight against book bans, Publishers Weekly reports. The association is urging its 110 members to donate to We Are Stronger Than Censorship, an initiative cosponsored by the Independent Book Publishers Association and EveryLibrary Institute. If members raise $16,000, BMI will match that donation. We Are Stronger Than Censorship uses donated funds to buy two books from independent publishers for every book that is banned or challenged. The books are then given to schools and libraries targeted by bans and challenges.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, a giant of modern African literature, has died at age eighty-seven, the BBC reports. His work, which spanned roughly sixty years, documented the transformation of Kenya from a colonial subject to an independent democracy. Ngũgĩ published his last English-language novel in 1977, after which he vowed only to write in his first language, Kikuyu.
Readers were surprised and disappointed to find an AI prompt in the published version of a fantasy novel, showing the author’s request to copy another writer’s style, Futurism reports. Author Lena McDonald prompted the AI chatbot to rewrite a passage to align more with the style of J. Bree—the human author of an internationally bestselling series of romance and fantasy novels. This incident is yet another demonstration of how Amazon is being overwhelmed with self-published, AI-generated content.
HarperCollins and HQ are launching a new literary fiction imprint called Juniper, which will publish eight to twelve novels a year beginning in spring 2026, the Bookseller reports.
Ellie Berger is stepping down as the president of Scholastic Trade Publishing on June 11, Publishers Weekly reports. Berger started working at Scholastic in 1985 as an associate managing editor and was named publisher of the trade division in 2006. Scholastic will announce plans for replacing Berger shortly.
A new exhibition celebrating the life and legacy of Jane Austen for her 250th anniversary will be open at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City from June 6 through September 14, Fine Books & Collections reports. Among other treasures, the exhibition includes Austen’s only surviving complete fiction manuscript of Lady Susan, her short epistolary novel; a playful letter to her niece; and four of the six known surviving copies of the first American edition of Emma, printed in 1816.
In the Poets on Translation series in Poetry, Geoffrey Brock writes about what we lose in our eagerness to acknowledge what gets lost in translation. “Though the original sounds of a poem do indeed vanish in translation, poetry doesn’t live solely in its sounds,” Brock writes. “There is also something like ‘content’ or ‘meaning,’ which, though often overrated and overemphasized in classrooms, is not nothing. There are also other, often more important qualities: tone or voice, imagery or metaphor or even story; the logic or illogic of a poem that can disrupt or reshape our existing ideas about ourselves or our world; and so on.”
An appeals court has reversed the decision of a district court’s preliminary injunction in a Texas book banning case, Publishers Weekly reports. Seven library patrons in Llano, Texas, filed a lawsuit in April 2022 over the removal of seventeen books from the Llano branch library. The appeals court, however, has dismissed free speech claims, claiming that “plaintiffs cannot invoke a right to receive information to challenge a library’s removal of books,” “a decision that contradicts long-established anti-censorship law including the Supreme Court’s 1982 decision in Board of Education v. Pico,” according to Publishers Weekly. The ruling also declared that the curation of a library’s collection is “government speech” and therefore not subject to “Free speech challenge.” Activists against book banning found this line of reasoning “devastating” and alarming, noting that this argument lays the groundwork for much more censorship.
Emma Goldberg writes for the New York Times about Sam Freedman’s final semester teaching his legendary class at Columbia Journalism School. In the thirty-five years Freedman has taught the course, there have been 113 book contracts and ninety-five published books out of the 675 students who have taken it.
