The Trump administration is demanding enormous cuts to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the New York Times reports. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is recommending that the NEH reduce its staff by 70 to 80 percent (approximately 180 people). Additionally, the DOGE recommendations could amount to a termination of all grants made under the Biden administration that have not been fully paid out. The NEH was founded in 1965 and has distributed more than $6 billion in grants to museums, historical sites, universities, libraries, and other cultural institutions since then.

Arts and cultural industries grew at twice the rate of the U.S. economy between 2022 and 2023, adding $1.2 trillion, according to new data from the Arts and Cultural Production Satellite Account (ACPSA). ACPSA is a product of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

The National Book Foundation has announced this year’s 5 Under 35 honorees: Stacie Shannon Denetsosie, Megan Howell, Maggie Millner, Alexander Sammartino, and Jemimah Wei. All the writers will receive $1,250 at a public ceremony in New York on June 4.

The nonprofit that created National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, is shutting down, Publishers Weekly reports. The organization, which became a 501(c)(3) in 2005, is closing after various controversies regarding the nonprofit’s stance on AI and content moderation, as well as financial difficulties. NaNoWriMo seemed to endorse the use of generative AI to write novels last fall, and following outcry, amended its statement several times before asserting that it was “taking a position of neutrality” toward AI and maintained “that its ethical use must be advocated for.” The interim executive director Kilby Blades announced that the closure was due to “a six-year downward trend in participation,” which she called “a logical outcome…not a salacious tale of scandal.”

Niko Pfund has been named the new director of Yale University Press, Publishers Weekly reports. Pfund joins Yale from Oxford University Press, where he served as global academic publisher and president of its U.S. division. Pfund succeeds John Donatich, who has led Yale University Press since 2003, and is retiring on June 30.

The entire staff of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has been placed on administrative leave as the Trump administration continues its efforts to shrink federal agencies, NPR reports. According to the American Library Association, “the majority of federal library funds” comes from the IMLS, which distributed $266 million in grants to cultural institutions last year.

The New York Public Library has published a list of the twenty-five best new poetry books for adults. The list includes Book of Kin (Autumn House Press) by Darius Atefat-Peckham, Forest of Noise (Knopf) by Mosab Abu Toha, and Yard Show (BOA Editions) by Janice N. Harrington, among other titles.

The New Yorker has published notes by Joan Didion describing her sessions with the psychiatrist Roger MacKinnon that are part of the New York Public Library’s recently opened Didion and John Gregory Dunne archive. “Readers of her memoirs The Year of Magical Thinking, written in the wake of Dunne’s sudden death, in 2003, at the age of seventy-one, and Blue Nights, about [their daughter] Quintana’s death less than two years later, at thirty-nine, will recognize how these notes inform those final books—the striving to understand and the sense of futility that comes with it,” the New Yorker editor David Remnick writes. Read the cover profile of Joan Didion, “The Light at Dusk” (November/December 2011), from the Poets & Writers Magazine archive. 

A group of authors including Richard Osman, Kazuo Ishiguro, Kate Mosse, and Val McDermid have signed an open letter calling on the UK government to hold Meta accountable over its use of copyrighted books to train artificial intelligence, the Guardian reports. The statement, written by the Society of Authors, was published on Change.org in the form of a petition, and has since garnered nearly 5,000 signatures.

Aspen Words, a literary center and program of the Aspen Institute, today announced an initial lineup of authors who are confirmed to participate in the inaugural Aspen Literary Festival, taking place September 26 to Septemner 28, 2025, in Aspen, Colorado. Confirmed authors include Elin Hilderbrand, Michael Lewis, Kevin Kwan, Leigh Bardugo, Bonnie Garmus, V. E. Schwab, Jasmine Guillory, Nathan Hill, and Victor LaValle.

Matthew Purdy writes in the New York Times Magazine about what George Orwell, author of the prescient novel 1984, might think about politics today. “In 1984, the ultimate power is the power to define truth,” Purdy writes. “And it remains so.”

Four senators defended the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) in a bipartisan letter to the agency’s acting director, Publishers Weekly reports. In the March 26 memo, the senators identify themselves as the lead authors of the 2018 Museum and Library Services Act, and “remind the Administration of its obligation to faithfully execute the provisions of the law as authorized.” The senators also underscored that IMLS funding should be renewed according to statutory requirements.

In the New York Times, A.O. Scott reflects on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, which turns one hundred this year. Scott considers the afterlives and possible contexts for Jay Gatsby with subtitles including “Jazz Age Gatsby,” “Existential Gatsby,” “High-Low Gatsby,” and “Hip-Hop Gatsby.” Images from film, television, and other media are integrated into the article, reinforcing the novel’s enduring impact on popular culture.

The Atlantic has compiled a list of the best American poetry books of the twenty-first century (so far). Among the twenty-five titles are Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017) by Danez Smith, Nox (New Directions, 2010) by Anne Carson, and Crush (Yale University Press, 2005) by Richard Siken.

The Rumpus has announced that Roxane Gay and Debbie Millman will be the magazine’s new owners. Gay and Millman will take over the Rumpus starting May 1, succeeding the magazine’s current publisher, Alyson Sinclair. Roxane Gay, a founding essays editor of the Rumpus, said, “It’s a truly full-circle moment,” and Debbie Millman, a celebrated designer, writer, and educator, plans to bring renewed attention to the way visual artists appear in the magazine.

Taylor & Francis (T&F) will translate books into English using AI, Publishers Weekly reports. The academic publisher has said that all AI-translated manuscripts will be copyedited and reviewed by T&F editors and the books’ authors before publication. The U.K.’s Society of Authors criticized T&F soon after the announcement, with Society of Authors CEO Anna Ganley telling the Bookseller that “AI-generated translation is just one of the ways that AI is presenting an existential threat to creators.” Ganley added that the AI T&F is using has likely been trained on “unlawfully scraped data.”

The University of Georgia Press has announced a new series called African Language Literatures in Translation, a venue for both classic and contemporary literature originally written in indigenous African languages. The series editors will be Alexander Fyfe and Christopher Ernest Ouma, and the first titles are slated to be published in Spring 2026. Fyfe says, “With this series, we want to create a sustainable venue for translations of African-language writing that makes texts available to Anglophone readerships, while contributing positively and responsibly to the publishing and translation ecosystems that already support African writing.”

After an Alabama board voted to defund the Fairhope Public Library due to complaints about books in the teen section, Read Freely Alabama started an online fundraiser to replace state funding, the Washington Post reports. Within five days, the fundraiser reached its goal of $40,000, allowing the library to stay open as battles over book banning continue.

In the latest installment of the New York Times series By the Book, Maggie Smith discusses her new book, Dear Writer: Pep Talks & Practical Advice for the Creative Life (One Signal Publishers, April 2025), and “unlearning” her identity as a poet. “I’d thought of myself as a poet only for many years, and I’ve had to set that limiting belief aside, to unlearn it, in order to write other kinds of books without feeling like an interloper in other genres,” she says. Read an excerpt from Smith’s Dear Writer in the January/February 2025 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Ahead of the Black British Book Festival, which was established in 2021, literary figures say the number of books being published by Black writers has “plummeted,” the Guardian reports. Only 3 percent of the British publishing workforce is Black, and though there was a surge of interest after the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, that interest was not sustained. Sharmaine Lovegrove, who cofounded the Black Writers’ Guild and established Hachette’s Dialogue imprint, said things are harder for new Black authors now than they were pre-2020.