Three hundred incarcerated people at twelve prisons across the country are in the process of selecting the winner of this year’s Inside Literary Prize, Minnesota Public Radio News writes. The prize, which was first awarded in 2024, is a collaboration between Freedom Reads, the Center for Justice and Innovation, and the National Book Foundation, and is determined entirely by a jury of incarcerated readers. “There were times where I walked in the room and I'm like, ‘I'm not with this book, I don't get it,’” Makayla Richardson, one of the prize’s judges, says of the selection process. “But then, to sit in a room with other people and get their perspectives…it's just very helpful and educational.” (Read about the launch of the award program in “Prize Judged by Incarcerated Readers” by Alissa Greenberg, from the May/June 2024 issue.)
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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.
Workers at the American Library Association voted overwhelmingly in favor of unionizing earlier this week, Publishers Weekly reports. Employee concerns include anxiety about multi-round layoffs and desire for better pay and benefits as well as more professional development opportunities. “We couldn’t be happier with the strong and definitive victory we saw, and we’re gratified to see the staff so unified,” David Connolly, an employee of the ALA, is quoted saying. “It’s been a difficult time for the association's budget…in particular with the elimination of salary increases this year and the rollback in retirement benefits.”
The American Booksellers Association has reported that its membership has grown by more than five hundred in the last year, with the total number of associated bookstores nearly triple what it was a decade ago and the highest it has been since the late 1990s, according to the Associated Press. This surge (to a total of 3,417 members at 3,783 locations) is partially thanks to a recent proliferation of stores specializing in the popular genres of romance, fantasy, and romantasy. “People are craving connection, especially in-person connection,” Kelley Hartnett, the owner of Double Dog Bookshop in Wentzville, Missouri, is quoted saying. “People are over the internet and virtual meetings and algorithms. They’re not the same as having a human-to-human connection. It feels really healing.”
Recent reports that Steven Rosenbaum's book The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality contains quotes made up by AI have underscored the extent to which nonfiction book publishers are ill-equipped to handle the onset of AI, Charlotte Klein writes for New York magazine. Publishers typically do not pay for books to be fact-checked, which means that authors must either pay an outside checker themselves—which typically costs somewhere between $7,000 and $10,000—or forgo this process. And there is no industry standard as to what AI usage, if any, is permissible. “A lot of authors are well intentioned in their use of AI and don’t want to rely on AI to generate work that they would then present as their own,” Todd Shuster, cofounder of the literary agency Aevitas, told Klein. “But they might rely on AI for some research or ideas around the structure of the book or outline. And the author then sort of forgets or denies or suppresses the extent to which they relied on the AI for such research.”
In the wake of last week’s revelations that an AI detection tool raised red flags about a Commonwealth Prize-winning short story, the Authors Guild put five of the top AI detection tools to the test to see how likely they are to mistakenly flag human-written work as AI-generated. The Authors Guild selected ten of its articles published in 2022 or earlier, before generative AI was widely available, and ran them through the five AI detectors. Three were almost entirely accurate, while two—ZeroGPT and Sidekicker.ai—were either unpredictable or totally inaccurate. Ironically, the Authors Guild points out, because AI models are trained on polished writing, "The more refined and controlled a writer’s style, the more it may resemble the output these tools are designed to flag. This creates a troubling paradox. A writer who has spent decades honing clarity, economy, and precision is, by definition, writing in a way that overlaps with what AI has learned to produce.”
Five North American public library organizations issued a statement yesterday calling on the Big Five publishers to negotiate e-book lending models on the grounds that digital pricing is straining library budgets, according to Publishers Weekly. This statement is just the latest chapter in the ongoing battle between libraries and publishers concerning digital licensing. In their defense, publishers have stressed the importance of making sure that authors are compensated within lending systems. On the other hand, Angela Goodrich, COO of the Urban Libraries Council, told Publishers Weekly that many large, high-circulating library systems are spending more than 50 percent of their collections budget on licensing. “That’s exponentially larger than what we were doing eight years ago, and part of that is because e-books and audiobooks are more expensive than print books,” she pointed out.
The Independent Publishers Caucus has released the Independent Press Top 40 best-seller list for the week ending May 24, 2026. The list is compiled in partnership with the American Booksellers Association and identifies “the top titles from independent presses as represented at independent bookstores across the U.S.” New to the list this week are Taiwan Travelogue (Graywolf Press) by Yang Shuang-zi, which was named the winner of the 2026 International Booker Prize last week, at no. 7; She Who Remains (Sandorf Passage) by Rene Karabash at no. 32; Plastic, Prism, Void: Part One (Littlepuss Press) by Violet Allen at no. 35; Riverwork (Coach House Books) by Lisa Robertson at no. 38; and Cat Poems (New Directions), edited by Tynan Kogane, at no. 40.
A 2022 reprint of the 2006 young adult novel Pretty Little Liars has generated backlash online because it replaced references to the early aughts with more current mentions of TikTok, Snapchat, and Billie Eilish, the New York Times reports. Modernization, or updating cultural and technological references, has long been a practice in publishing, especially in middle-grade and young adult books. Proponents of this strategy say that dated references can prevent younger readers from feeling fully engrossed in a story and even sometimes from simply understanding what’s going on. But others argue that there’s something to be said for trusting young readers. “There’s no single, universal idea of what kids want,” Jennifer Buehler, a young adult literature scholar at Saint Louis University, is quoted saying. “You can’t assume all kids will be turned off when they sense the adult behind the book.”
A Canadian company named Zoom Books has been accused of buying tens of thousands of books from shops around the world to train AI models, Publishers Lunch writes. The Spanish news outlet Demócrata first alleged that bookstores in Germany, Australia, Spain, and elsewhere were receiving the bulk orders. Badalona bookstore owner Marçal Font told the publication that he had received seven orders in a row for large numbers of obscure Catalon nonfiction titles. “On average, they are books of five or ten euros, many practically impossible to find,” he is quoted as saying. Zoom Books subsequently responded to the accusations, saying in a statement to Publishers Lunch that the Demócrata allegations are false. “To be unequivocally clear: Zoom Books does not digitize or destroy used or new books for the purpose of training AI models, nor for any other purpose,” the company wrote. “Any claim or implication to the contrary is inaccurate.”
A recent survey by the Association of American Literary Agents found that members, particularly those who are early in their careers, are concerned about financial instability, delays brought about by publisher consolidation and staffing reductions, and the effects of AI on the industry, according to Publishers Weekly. The results indicate that the average literary agent today holds more than one position within their agency; works more than forty hours a week, including on weekends; and receives more than twenty queries from potential new authors each week. “The survey makes clear that literary agents are carrying an increasingly complex and demanding set of responsibilities in a rapidly changing publishing environment,” AALA president Regina Brooks said in a statement. “These findings reflect larger concerns about sustainability, workload, compensation, and the long-term health of the publishing ecosystem.” (Read “Q&A: Regina Brooks Leads AALA” by Katie Arnold-Ratliff.)
In an essay for Inside Higher Ed, Katherine J. Chen debunks the notion that a humanities PhD can easily double as an opportunity to work on one’s creative writing. While it’s true that creative writers and academics share many of the same skills, Chen pushes back on the idea that a PhD is anything less than an intensive, full-time commitment. “If pursuing a PhD is intellectually demanding, so, too, is creative writing,” she writes. “To combine the two in the hopes that one will support the other seems a surefire recipe for burnout. At the end of the day, a PhD program isn’t the equivalent of a multiyear Yaddo or MacDowell residency, and it shouldn’t be mistaken for such.”
The Association of American Publishers announced last week that it is partnering with the AI licensing and protection platform Vermillio to find and take down unauthorized copies of audiobooks produced or reproduced by AI, according to Publishers Weekly. Vermillio will use its TraceID tool, which is available to individuals for free, to identify protected intellectual property and help remove pirated content on generative AI platforms as well as distribution platforms like YouTube. “Publishers are moving strategically from defense to offense in the AI era,” Dan Neely, cofounder and CEO of Vermillio, said in a statement. “We need independent solutions, not ones owned by the very platforms seeking to monetize work that isn't theirs.”
Authors and editors who are concerned about the threat that AI poses to their profession may be well served by trying to understand this new technology a little better, Boris Kachka argues in the Atlantic. Last week’s revelations that a short story awarded a prize from the Commonwealth Foundation and published in Granta may be AI-generated, that Nobel Prize-winning writer Olga Tokarczuk uses AI while brainstorming, and that a nonfiction book about AI contains chatbot-generated quotes all underscored not just how pervasive AI-inflected writing is becoming but also how ill-equipped many literary organizations are to address this shift. “Like many organizations, Granta and the Commonwealth Foundation are in a very tough spot: To advance their noble goal of promoting exciting work, they need to build trusting, protective relationships with writers even as they hold them to exacting standards, all in the face of unprecedented challenges to literary integrity,” Kachka writes. “But managing the risks of LLM technology requires understanding it.”
Last week Spotify introduced a new AI-powered tool for self-publishing audiobooks, TechCrunch reports. Powered by the AI voice generator ElevenLabs, the tool will be rolled out within the Spotify for Authors platform starting this June, albeit initially by invitation only. In recent years Spotify has invested heavily in building out its audiobook offerings; at present there are a million subscribers to its Audiobook+ plans, and its catalogue features 700,000 titles. “The company brought the program to international markets, made an investment in non-English titles, enabled in-app purchases, and released audiobook charts. This year, it also started a program for authors to sell physical books in the U.S. and the U.K.,” Ivan Mehta writes. “Through these initiatives, the company has managed to bump up listening hours by 60 percent year-on-year, the company claims.”
For readers struggling to focus on words on the page, NPR suggests trying immersive reading. This strategy entails listening to an audiobook and following along in a physical copy of the book at the same time. It is often used to support students with dyslexia and ADHD and has recently become popular among online communities of readers. While this simultaneous reading and listening doesn’t always lead to “deep reading,” according to UCLA cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, she’s still in favor of it: “With a decline of reading for leisure, for heaven's sake, do whatever we can to get our young and old to say ‘this is a return to this experience of being immersed in other worlds with other people.’”
The Guardian has published its ranking of the 100 best novels published in English. The publication compiled its list by asking more than 170 novelists, critics, and academics to list their top ten novels ranked in order and then tallying the results. Salman Rushdie, Anne Enright, Stephen King, and Yiyun Li were among the participants. The top spot went to George Eliot’s Middlemarch, with Toni Morrison’s Beloved in second. “The most striking difference between this list and its predecessors is an increase in female writers: 36 out of 100 compared with 21 in 2015 and a paltry 16 in 2003, with only Jane Austen’s Emma and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in the top ten of both previous lists. The number of women rises as the decades go by; half of the contemporary writers are female. This might not announce the decline of the great white male, but it does signal a much-needed reset.”
Earlier this week, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled against Anna’s Archive, a pirate website that had been copying and selling copyrighted material, according to Publishers Weekly. A group of thirteen publishers filed suit against the site on March 6, and the defendants never replied to the charges, so the judge presiding over the case was able to grant a default judgment. This decision is an important move towards keeping AI companies from using sites like Anna’s Archive to illegally access books and journals with which to train their models. “We thank the court for this powerful decision, which sends a clear message that piracy will not be tolerated, and that pirate repositories like Anna’s Archive are the wrong place for big tech companies to acquire the high-quality content—including books and journals—that they need to develop powerful AI systems,” Lui Simpson, executive vice president for global policy for the Association of American Publishers, is quoted saying in a statement.
Thousands online are calling for boycotting Barnes & Noble after its CEO James Daunt went viral earlier this week for saying he has “no problem” selling AI-written books that are labeled as such, according to the Los Angeles Times. Daunt has since clarified that the bookseller does not, to his knowledge, sell any AI-generated books, and that it would only do so if there is a demand for these books and if they are labeled appropriately. “The argument is nuanced, and perhaps over nuanced, but there are important principles that have to be balanced and I believe we do so as sensibly and thoughtfully as is possible,” he is quoted saying. “Book banning is a clear and present danger, so we are very careful with demands to ban any books.” But, he added, the company is also careful “not to sell AI generated books that masquerade to be by real authors.”
The New York Public Library has acquired the professional and personal archive of noted New Journalist and bestselling author Gay Talese. The papers, which will be housed in the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, document over 80 years of Talese’s life and career, including manuscripts, research files, photographs, and correspondence with contemporaries such as Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Wolfe, and Nora Ephron. The collection is expected to become available to the public in 2029. “The acquisition of the Gay Talese archive solidifies the New York Public Library as the landmark repository for twentieth century journalism and New Journalism in particular,” said Julie Golia, director of the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Library. “Talese’s careful archiving of his own work provides deep insight into his innovative, meticulous, and influential approach to writing and reporting.”
Little, Brown will use a new colophon in books published across all of its imprints starting in August, according to Publishers Weekly. The 189-year-old publisher last adopted a new colophon in 2009. This new colophon reimagines that design, which was inspired by antique typewriter keys, giving it a sleeker look. “It felt important that Little, Brown be seen as the heritage brand it truly is, with a visual identity that fully reflects that history and stature, as well as its future,” Little, Brown executive art director Gregg Kulick is quoted as saying.
The Independent Publishers Caucus has released the Independent Press Top 40 best-seller list for the week ending May 17, 2026. The list is compiled in partnership with the American Booksellers Association and identifies “the top titles from independent presses as represented at independent bookstores across the U.S.” The top five fiction titles are: 1. The Calamity Club (Spiegel & Grau) by Kathryn Stockett, 2. John of John (Grove Press) by Douglas Stuart, 3. Heart the Lover (Grove Press) by Lily King, 4. I Who Have Never Known Men (Transit Books) by Jacqueline Harpman, and 5. On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) (New Directions) by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J. Haveland.
Earlier this week, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize made headlines when online readers accused the author of one of its winning stories, which was published by Granta, of having used AI, and the New York Times takes a closer look. “We’ve taken stock of the comments and tried to be very systematic in our understanding of some of the perspectives and tried to look at ourselves internally to see if we feel that our process to date has been robust enough,” Razmi Farook, the director general of the Commonwealth Foundation is quoted as saying. “We’re confident in the rigor of our process, but we’re conscious that this is an evolving technological environment.” The accusations made against the author have underscored how difficult it is to figure out whether something was actually written by a person. After all, many of the AI writing tics readers pointed out online—like an excessive use of metaphor or negative parallelism—often appear in human writing, too.
Taiwan Travelogue, a novel by Yang Shuang-zi and translated by Lin King, has been named winner of the 2026 International Booker Prize, the New York Times reports. This is the first book translated from Mandarin and the first by a Taiwanese author to win the award, which includes a prize of £50,000 (approximately $67,000), split evenly between the author and translator. The novel tells the story of a young Japanese novelist who travels to Taiwan in 1938, when the island was occupied by Japan, and falls in love with her female translator. Natasha Brown, an author and the chair of the prize jury, said in a news conference that the book “pulls off an incredible double feat: It succeeds as both a romance and an incisive postcolonial novel.”
James Daunt, the CEO of Barnes & Noble, said on NBC’s Today that he would support stocking books written by AI in the company’s stores. “As long as an AI-written book says it’s an AI-written book and doesn’t pretend to be something else and isn’t ripping off somebody else, as long as that’s clearly stated and the customer wants to buy it, then we will stock them,” Daunt said. In 2019, the same year Daunt stepped into his role, the company faced bankruptcy, but in the years since Barnes & Noble has bounced back, opening sixty-seven new stores in 2025 and another sixty this year.
The Community of Literary Magazines & Presses (CLMP) has announced the finalists for its twelfth annual Firecracker Awards for Independently Published Literature. The annual prizes are awarded in the book categories of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction as well as magazines: for general excellence and best debut. The Firecracker Awards “celebrate the books and magazines that make a significant contribution to our literary culture and the publishers that strive to introduce important voices to readers far and wide.” The winners will be announced on June 25. The winners in the book categories will each receive $2,000 ($1,000 for the press and $1,000 for the author or translator), and those in the magazine categories will each receive $1,000. The winning books will be distributed to over 750 independent booksellers across the country in partnership with the American Booksellers Association, and will be promoted by CLMP.
“The Serpent in the Grove,” a story written by Jamir Nazir and published by Granta in partnership with the Commonwealth Foundation Short Story Prize, was allegedly AI-generated, Publishers Lunch reports. On Bluesky, fiction writer Christopher Linforth and University of Pennsylvania professor Ethan Mollick separately describe running the story through the AI-checker Pangram, which detected red flags. When Granta learned of these allegations the editors asked Claude.ai whether the story had been written with AI, and the response suggested that the story was “almost certainly not produced unaided by a human,” pointing to passages that are specific enough that it would have been hard for a model to write them unaided. “The intention of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize is to find writers from around the Commonwealth and bring them to global attention. It may be that the judges have now awarded a prize to an instance of AI plagiarism—we don’t yet know, and perhaps we never will know,” Granta publisher Sigrid Rausing said in a statement. “There is, however, a certain irony in the fact that beyond human hunches AI itself is the most efficient tool we have for revealing what is AI generated.”
The National Book Foundation announced today that it has elected four new members to its board of directors: Greg Greeley, CEO of Simon & Schuster; Franklin Leonard, founder and CEO of the Black List; Elizabeth McNamara, a partner at Davis Wright Tremaine; and Miwa Messer, executive producer of author events and content at Barnes & Noble. The four new members join eighteen others on the organization’s board. “Greg, Franklin, Elizabeth, and Miwa bring significant experience in the literary ecosystem, a deep commitment to the written word, and a shared vision that access to books and reading are for everyone, everywhere,” said Ruth Dickey, executive director of the National Book Foundation. “It is our honor to work alongside them to champion the work of writers and translators and celebrate the joys of reading.”
Sales in the first quarter of 2026 are up among the more than 1,400 publishers who report revenue to the Association of American Publishers, according to Publishers Weekly. Compared to the first quarter of 2025, sales rose 0.9 percent, with increases seen in every category except for adult books and religion. Professional and scholarly books and those from university presses both posted increases of 5.7 percent, and sales of children’s and YA books rose 2.6 percent. “The 2.6 percent increase in the children’s/YA segment was due entirely to a 16.8 percent jump in sales in the relatively small nonfiction category. The two most important formats, paperback and hardcover, had sales of 23.2 percent and 9.1 percent, respectively.”
The Society of Authors and the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain (WGGB) have joined forces to issue a new report, How to Protect Against Scammers: A Guide for Authors. This guidance comes on the heels of reports from both organizations that AI scams coaxing writers to pay money or give up rights to their work are becoming a more pressing issue on both sides of the pond. “Even the most vigilant of writers are understandably falling prey to these scams,” WGGB General Secretary Ellie Peers said. “We therefore hope that our new joint guidance with the Society of Authors will help authors assess whether opportunities are genuine or fraudulent, provide practical actions they can take to protect themselves, and signpost sources of further support and expert advice.” For more information, read “Beware of Scams Targeting Writers,” a collection of coverage from Poets & Writers Magazine.
New York City Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani announced on Friday that the 2027 Fiscal Year Budget will add $31.7 million in permanent funding to the baseline for the city’s three public library systems: the Queens Public Library, the Brooklyn Public Library, and the New York Public Library. In the past, it wasn’t a guarantee that New York’s libraries would have funding restored each year, creating uncertainty around long-term decisions. “For too long, library funding has been treated like a political bargaining chip and fought over every single year,” Mayor Mamdani said at a press conference. “By baselining this funding, we are giving every branch in every borough the stability to plan ahead, hire staff and serve New Yorkers without wondering if the money will disappear next spring.”
Researchers at Trinity College Dublin have discovered the oldest-surviving English poem, the Associated Press reports. The Old English verse, “Caedmon’s Hymn,” was written by a Northumbrian agricultural worker in the seventh century and unearthed within a manuscript of a Latin ecclesiastical history dating back to the ninth century. “Prior to the discovery of [this] manuscript, the earliest one was from the early twelfth century. So this is three centuries earlier than that. And so it attests to the importance that was already being attached to the English in the early [ninth] century,” Mark Faulkner, an associate professor of medieval literature at Trinity, told the AP. It appears that Caedmon wrote these lines after attending a feast where others were reciting poetry, prompting him to excuse himself because he was embarrassed that he didn’t have anything to contribute.
Prolific audiobook narrator Lindsay Dorcus is among a group of six Illinois voice actors, podcasters, and journalists bringing class action lawsuits against tech companies that trained AI models on their “voice footprints,” Publishers Lunch reports. Nine separate lawsuits brought against Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, ElevenLabs, Adobe, and Samsung allege that the vocal talents’ works were “scraped” from internet sources for training purposes without the narrators’ consent, a violation of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). “The Amazon suit is particularly pointed on the topic of audiobook narration, claiming that Amazon’s ignoring BIPA was ‘a deliberate institutional decision.’”
“Archaeologists working in Egypt have discovered a remarkable combination of Homeric epic and Egyptian ritual: a 2,000-year-old mummy with a papyrus fragment of the Iliad sealed in a clay packet outside its wrappings,” the New York Times reports. The papyrus fragment was unearthed at a burial site known as Oxyrhynchus, where it accompanied the mummy of a non-royal male, bundled close to the body. Scholars speculate that the passage served as more than good reading on the long path to eternity: “For a Roman-era Egyptian, the Iliad—specifically some lines from Book 2’s ‘Catalogue of Ships’—was perhaps as crucial for navigating the afterlife as a magical spell.”
Final approval of a $1.5 billion settlement between Anthropic and authors whose works were used to train its AI model Claude stalled yesterday as the judge in the case asked for more details about “issues including lawyers’ fees and payments to lead plaintiffs in what is the largest known U.S. copyright settlement,” Reuters reports. The settlement had received initial approval from Judge William Alsup, now retired, in September 2025, making it the first major U.S. case settled concerning authors’ rights in the training of AI. “Authors and other copyright holders filed claims covering over 92 percent of the more than 480,000 works included in the settlement, an attorney for the authors said during the hearing. The settlement has spurred objections from authors who have argued it is not large enough, overcompensates the plaintiffs’ attorneys, or wrongly excludes some copyright owners.”
American poet Sasha Debevec-McKenney has won the Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize for her debut collection, Joy Is My Middle Name (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2025). She received £20,000 (approximately $26,794). The other poet shortlisted for this year’s prize were Harriet Armstrong for To Rest Our Minds and Bodies (Les Fugitives), Colwill Brown for We Pretty Pieces of Flesh (Vintage), Suzannah V. Evans for Under the Blue (Bloomsbury), Seán Hewitt for Open, Heaven (Vintage), and Derek Owusu for Borderline Fiction (Canongate). The judges were Irenosen Okojie, Joe Dunthorne, Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe, Prajwal Parajuly, and Eley Williams. The annual award celebrates “exceptional literary talent” under the age of forty.
The New York Public Library and Random House Publishing Group are partnering to offer the Kate Medina Fellowship for Literary Narrative Nonfiction to support writers whose projects “engage meaningfully” with the library’s onsite collections, including manuscripts, archives, books, photographs, prints, maps, newspapers, and journals. The selected fellow will receive a stipend of $30,000 to support four months of research between September 1, 2026, and March 15, 2027. Applications are due June 15.
The Independent Publishers Caucus has released the Independent Press Top 40 best-seller list for the week ending May 10, 2026. The list is compiled in partnership with the American Booksellers Association and identifies “the top titles from independent presses as represented at independent bookstores across the U.S.” The top five fiction titles are: 1. The Calamity Club (Spiegel & Grau) by Kathryn Stockett, 2. John of John (Grove Press) by Douglas Stuart, 3. Heart the Lover (Grove Press) by Lily King, 4. I Who Have Never Known Men (Transit Books) by Jacqueline Harpman, and 5. On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) (New Directions) by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J. Haveland.
Lee Lai has won Australia’s Stella Prize, becoming the first nonbinary writer and first graphic novelist to take home the prestigious award, the Guardian reports. Lai receives the $60,000 honor for her book Cannon, published by Canadian press Drawn + Quarterly. The book follows a queer Chinese woman living in Montreal who cares for an aging relative by day and works at an upscale restaurant by night. The Stella Prize is offered by the nonprofit Stella, which describes itself as “the major voice for gender equity and cultural change in Australian literature;” the prize was opened to nonbinary writers in 2021.
Hachette Book Group leadership has launched a campaign to dissuade its employees from seeking to unionize, Publishers Lunch reports. With headings including “Why We Believe Hachette Is Stronger Without a Union” and “What You Could Lose With Union Negotiation,” a series of electronic messages and flyers posted around the Hachette offices present the company’s talking points. Hachette Workers Coalition responded online, arguing that the corporate messages “[frame] the union as a third party that will harm our existing benefits and workplace culture. ...But the union is all of us, and we won’t be intimidated.”
Texas Book Festival has announced its launch of Burro Libro Press, a new imprint that will focus on “discovering and publishing debut literary fiction by emerging writers with strong ties to Texas.” Developed in collaboration with the Austin-based indie press Deep Vellum Publishing, Burro Libro will find authors through an annual first book contest in which winners will receive publication, $5,000, a professionally-produced audiobook, and promotion at the Texas Book Festival. Submission for the inaugural contest will be open from June 1 to June 30. “We are excited to partner with Texas Book Festival on a program that creates new opportunities for debut fiction writers connected to Texas,” said Jill Meyers, editorial director of Deep Vellum, in a press release. “Deep Vellum has always believed in championing ambitious literary voices, and this collaboration allows us to support emerging authors in a meaningful and lasting way while deepening our partnership with Texas Book Festival.”
Writer Beware provides examples of the latest scams targeting writers, including an e-mail invitation to be a featured guest at a book festival or conference event and an offer to be interviewed on a radio show or podcast. “Unfortunately, AI-driven impersonation scams have glommed onto these events in a big way,” writes Victoria Strauss. “I’m getting a growing number of reports from writers who’ve received credible-seeming invitations that have turned out to be completely fake. It’s yet another area where writers must be extremely careful not to take anything at face value.” Among the details to look out for: “a Gmail, or occasionally an AOL, e-mail address where you’d normally expect the contact to come from a company or event email domain.”
Less than three weeks away from Pride Month, Kelly Jensen of Book Riot has released her annual guide to Pride displays in libraries. Intended primarily “to help library workers consider where and how to showcase LGBTQ+ books, programs, and other materials throughout June,” this year’s overview provides information about what to do if you see instances of censorship and how to write to your local library board about offering LGBTQ+ books and LGBTQ+ programming. “For libraries, Pride has traditionally been a month for joyful displays of queer books, with periodic and predictable complaints,” Jensen writes. “But several years into surging book bans, escalating violence, and swift-rising fascism, it is important to prepare for the upcoming month of events to anticipate all that has, does, and might arise.”
The winners of the 2026 British Book Awards (the Nibbies, as they’re commonly known) were announced at a ceremony in London on Monday, the Bookseller reports. Among the winners are the late Virginia Roberts Giuffre, whose Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice (Doubleday) won Overall Book of the Year as well as Book of the Year in the narrative nonfiction category; Florence Knapp, whose book The Names (Phoenix) won the award in the debut fiction category; and Oyinkan Braithwaite, whose audiobook Cursed Daughters (WF Howes), narrated by Weruche Opia, Diana Yekinni and Nnei Opia Clark, won in the audiobook fiction category.
A recent report from Ashley Woo, an associate policy researcher at RAND, drawing on data from the Spring 2025 American Instructional Resources Survey, offers insight into “concerns about the diminishing role of full books in schools.” The survey results suggest the peripheral nature of full-book reading in most secondary ELA classrooms, while showing that about two-thirds of teachers assigned only one to four books during the 2024-2025 school year. Teachers working with historically disadvantaged groups of students assigned fewer full books.
The New York Times has profiled Keith McNally, author of the memoir I Regret Almost Everything (Gallery Books, 2025) and the 2026 winner of the $50,000 Gotham Book Prize. McNally, the restaurateur behind NYC establishments such as Balthazar, Cafe Luxembourg, and the Odeon, writes about the successes and failures he’s met throughout his life. Bradley Tusk, a cofounder of the prize, shared that the judging for this year’s award was unusual in that McNally’s memoir received eight of the twelve judges’ votes in the very first round. “I like the idea of rewarding someone for being as self-aware and as accountable as McNally sounds in I Regret Almost Everything.”
Pine State Publicity, a PR firm located in North Carolina and founded by Cassie Mannes Murray in 2022, is starting a boutique literary agency, reports Publishers Weekly. Per an announcement, Pine State Literary (PSL), which is being headed by Zoe-Aline Howard, will focus on “voice-driven adult literary fiction and narrative nonfiction.” Howard states that their books will “challenge what we consider ‘marketable,’ and…break away from oversaturated settings like NYC and LA.” Publishers that Howard feels share an affinity with PSL include the South Carolina-based Hub City Press as well as Milkweed Editions in Minneapolis.
A federal judge has ruled that Department of Government Effiicency (DOGE) acted unconstitutionally when it cancelled more than 1,400 previously-approved grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the New York Times reports. While the ruling orders the cancellations rescinded, judge Colleen McMahon noted the “irreparable” damage done nonetheless: “The injury is not limited to the loss of money. It includes the disruption of protected expression, the interruption of ongoing research and publication, the cancellation or suspension of humanities programming, and the chilling effect caused by the government’s use of viewpoint-based and unauthorized criteria to terminate federal grants.” The terminations had previously come under additional scrutiny when it was revealed that DOGE employees had used ChatGPT to identify grants for cancellation based on keyword searches for terms including “L.G.B.T.Q.,” “BIPOC,” “equality,” “immigration,” and “citizenship.”
Ahead of Mother’s Day, novelist Lisa Owens reflects on the children’s literature that buoyed her family through its earliest days—and her affinity for the harried parents in those picture books’ margins. “The illustrations of the adults, though, were what captivated me: bleary-eyed, multitasking, pregnant, on the phone, clambered upon with glasses askew, cooking, affectionate, exhausted,” writes Owens for the New York Times. “Here was a vision of parenting in the round—the good, the bad and the will you please just go to bed. It brought me great comfort and relief.”
HarperCollins closed its most recent quarter with an 8 percent boost in sales, thanks in large part to the success of Rachel Reid’s hockey romance Heated Rivalry and other titles in the series, Publishers Weekly reports. “Digital sales accounted for 26 percent of revenue in the quarter, up 1 percent from a year ago. In addition to sales of Reid’s books, sales in the quarter benefitted from $6 million from recent acquisitions.”
USA Today looks at the new report by PEN America that shows the number of nonfiction books banned at schools has doubled. The report found that “3,743 unique titles were removed from school classrooms and libraries from July 1, 2024, to June 30, 2025. There were 6,780 total bans across 23 states during that period, according to the organization.” More than 1,000 of the titles, or 29 percent of the total, were nonfiction, more than double the number from the previous year. PEN America says the rise in censorship is due to a widespread “embrace of anti-intellectualism” and that the data “mirrors the broader political attack on facts and knowledge and a skepticism, disdain, and devaluing of experts and expertise—tactics long associated with the rise of authoritarian regimes to sow distrust in democratic institutions.”
Shelf Awareness, the publisher of two newsletters focused on books, bookselling, and book reviews, recently alerted subscribers to the phishing schemes that have become ubiquitous in the publishing and writing communities. “We have learned that Shelf Awareness and its staff are being used in phishing attempts directed at book authors,” the editors wrote in Wednesday’s newsletter. “Shelf Awareness does not charge for review coverage. If you receive an offer over e-mail to review your book in return for payment, it is a scam, and you should not interact with the sender.”
Daniel Umemezie of Cedar Falls, Iowa, was named the 2026–2027 National Youth Poet Laureate at a ceremony in Omaha, Nebraska, on April 25, according to Urban Word. Asked what his focus will be as the youth poet laureate, Umemezie said, “During my tenure as National Youth Poet Laureate, I want to champion work that refuses to make itself legible on anyone else’s terms: multilingual poetry, diasporic poetry, poetry as a form of political insistence, and poetry as self, because I believe that when a young writer chooses to inhabit the fiery tension between who they are and how they express that identity, they embody art itself.” An initiative of Urban Word, the National Youth Poet Laureate program identifies, celebrates, and honors teen poets who exhibit a commitment to not just artistic excellence but also civic engagement, youth leadership and social impact.
Poets & Writers today announced that Marianne Boruch is the winner of the 2026 Jackson Poetry Prize, a $100,000 award given to “an American poet of exceptional talent.” Established in 2006 with a gift from the Liana Foundation, the Jackson Poetry Prize is bestowed annually by Poets & Writers and named for the John and Susan Jackson family. The judges were Major Jackson, Cole Swensen, and Afaa Michael Weaver. “In poems rhetorically sinuous and compelling, Marianne Boruch renders luminous the expanse and reach of human thought,” the judges wrote in their citation. Boruch is an emeritus professor of creative writing at Purdue University, where she founded the MFA program and taught for more than thirty years. She has written eleven books of poetry, most recently Bestiary Dark (Copper Canyon Press, 2021).
Students at Southern Oregon University (SOU) in Ashland are opposing a plan released on Monday “that details some $20 million in suggested cuts from the university, including the Music, Gender Studies, Creative Writing, and International Studies programs,” Ashland.news reports. The school’s board of trustees is expected to vote on the plan on Friday, May 8. “The board must submit the final plan to the Higher Education Coordinating Commission by Monday, May 11, in order to be eligible to receive $15 million in one-time funding from the state of Oregon to keep the university solvent until summer 2027.” Some have accused Deloitte Consulting, a firm that has been actively involved in restructuring SOU, of using AI to formulate the plan; SOU officials have denied the claim.
For the Guardian, Raina Lipsitz takes a closer look at the circumstances surrounding the April decision by the legislature of Green County, New York, to rescind Esther Cohen’s appointment as the county’s first poet laureate after Republican legislator Michael Lanuto performed a “background check” during which he found in Cohen’s social media what he said was “the antithesis of what I believe this board stands for,” citing social media posts “about Zohran Mamdani (for) and Donald Trump (against).” Lipsitz quotes Bjorn Thorstad, founding executive director of the Hudson Valley Writers Residency and a member of the committee that selected the poet laureate, who says people see people view Cohen’s story “as emblematic of the assault on the arts writ large. ... Even though it’s only about one poet, even though government has a right to be discerning about its appointees, it’s nevertheless cutting too close to the bone for people who hate to see leadership leverage power against artists and free speech.”
Best-selling novelist Scott Turow has joined publishers Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Elsevier, and Cengage in filing a class-action copyright infringement lawsuit against Meta and its founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, the New York Times reports. “The complaint, which was filed on Tuesday morning in United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, accuses Meta and Zuckerberg of illegally using millions of copyrighted works to train their artificial intelligence program Llama, and of removing copyright notices and other copyright management information from those works.” The lawsuit also claimes that Zuckerberg personally authorized and encouraged the illegal activity. A Meta spokesperson says the company “will fight this lawsuit aggressively.”
USA Today visits Audible Story House, the world’s first bookless bookstore now open in New York City. The store, which is free and open to the public Wednesdays through Sundays during May, features more than three hundred audiobook titles that customers can sample. “Not quite a bookstore and also not quite a library, Story House is a community hub and listening lounge for readers to hang out and discover a new audio obsession,” Clare Mulroy writes.
Oprah Winfrey has selected John of John (Grove Atlantic, 2026), the third novel by Douglas Stuart, for her book club, the Associated Press reports. The best-selling author won the Booker Prize for his debut novel Shuggie Bain (Grove Atlantic 2020). To read more about John of John, read “Ten Questions for Douglas Stuart.”
Employees at the University of Chicago Press are the latest group of publishing workers to unionize, according to Publishers Lunch, having formed a union with the Chicago News Guild, TNG-CWA Local 34071. “The UPC Workers Guild is seeking recognition from management and ‘is advocating for nothing less than excellence in the treatment of the press’s workers.’ Its mission includes ‘pay equity, sustainability, and transparency.’” Last week workers at Hachette Book Group formed the largest union in publishing history, and in April workers at Catapult unionized.
The 2026 Pulitzer Prizes were announced today. The winner in poetry is Juliana Spahr for Ars Poetica (Wesleyan University Press); the finalists are Douglas Kearney for I Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always (Wave Books) and The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems by Patricia Smith. The winner in fiction is Daniel Kraus for Angel Down (Atria Books); the finalists are Katie Kitamura for Audition (Riverhead Books) and Torrey Peters for Stag Dance: A Quartet (Random House). The winner in memoir/autiobiography is Yiyun Li for Things in Nature Merely Grow (FSG); the finalists are Anelise Chen for Clam Down: A Metamorphosis (One World), Sarah Chihaya for Bibliophobia (Random House), and Hala Alyan for I’ll Tell You When I’m Home (Avid Reader Press).
On the heels of the recent film release of The Devil Wears Prada 2, Julia Rittenberg of Publishers Weekly uncovers the rise and fall of the chick lit genre. “Before it was a movie, Lauren Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada, published by Broadway Books in 2003, marked the absolute high point of that once ubiquitous genre.” Chick lit is said to have started thanks to the success of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’ Diary in 1996. However, soon after The Devil Wears Prada phenomenon, the chick lit market became oversaturated and the trend eventually fell off with the once overarching genre now being fragmented into distinct categories of romance or women’s fiction. “The millennials and Gen Z readers all have authors who are speaking to them, who are telling their story,” says Deborah Schneider, Weisberger’s longtime agent. “They’re writing a different story now, and it’s a little bit darker.”
Pizza Hut’s summer reading program is coming back this year to incentivize young readers with pizza parties, reports People Magazine. The BOOK IT! program recently announced the return of “Summer of Stories,” where kids from pre-K through sixth grade can earn personal pizzas and more for meeting reading goals. This time around, the program is also available for parents and teachers to utilize during the school year.
TIME Magazine has listed Bookshop.org as one of “The 10 Most Influential Social Good Companies of 2026,” alongside Dr. Bronner’s, Land O’Lakes, and Bombas. Last year, the company that is known for saving independent bookshops provided a record $9.5 million to local bookstores. Bookshop.org’s founder, Andy Hunter, has continued to expand the company’s reach and offerings with an e-book platform and the current development of an e-reader, stating, “Within the next two years we want to be the best place to shop online if you love books.”