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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.
A new report from PEN America’s annual Freedom to Write Index found that the number of writers placed behind bars reached a new high in 2024. The Freedom to Write Index has traced a steady increase in the number of writers incarcerated globally, from 238 in 2019 to 375 in 2024, up from 339 in 2023. In 2024, eighty writers were held in pre-trial detention, an increase from seventy-six in 2023. The majority of these cases were reported in China, Egypt, and Israel.
Two new documentaries, Banned Together (2024) and Free for All: The Public Library (2025), highlight anti-censorship activism amidst an increasing number of book bans in the U.S., Publishers Weekly reports. Banned Together, which is now streaming on Apple+ and Amazon Prime, follows high school students in South Carolina as they combat efforts to remove books from school library shelves. Free for All: The Public Library, which will be released on PBS Independent Lens on April 29, features a compilation of contemporary footage and archival material to trace the history of the library as a civic institution in the U.S.
Light and Thread (Moonji Publishing), a book featuring Han Kang’s Nobel Prize lecture, along with other essays and poems by the author, sold ten thousand copies in its first day on sale online, the Guardian reports.
Megan Mabee writes for Book Riot about how to recommend books like an expert. When recommending a book to someone, Mabee advises, consider that person’s favorite books, authors, genres, and preferred moods and pacing in storytelling. Mabee also encourages recommenders to consider a person’s hobbies, interests, and the media they consume—including television, films, and podcasts.
U.K. licensing bodies have announced a collective license that will allow authors to be compensated for the use of their works to train generative AI models, the Guardian reports. The collective license will be available to AI developers this summer and follows a survey conducted by the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society that found 81 percent of respondents wanted to be part of a collective licensing solution if case-by-case licensing was infeasible. The news of the license comes amidst a controversial proposal by the U.K. government to allow AI companies to freely mine copyrighted works unless rights holders opt out.
Literary activist groups have formally condemned Florida House Bill 1539, “legislation they claim would significantly restrict students’ access to books in Florida public schools,” Publishers Weekly reports. The bill would force school districts to remove any book judged to be “harmful to minors” within five days of a challenge, regardless of whether the book has gone through proper review processes. Organizations that signed the letter opposing the bill include American Booksellers for Free Expression, Authors Against Book Bans, the Authors Guild, and PEN America, among others.
All four Shakespeare folios will be auctioned with Sotheby’s for the first time as a collection since 1989, Fine Books & Collections reports. The set, which will be on sale in London on May 23, is estimated to be worth between 3.5 and 4.5 million pounds (between approximately $4,649,773 and $5,978,280).
Book publishers are observing a surging interest in the U.S. Constitution and have been printing new editions, the Associated Press reports. Random House announced a hardcover combined edition of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution to be published in July, followed by a hardcover edition of the Federalist Papers to be published in November. The founding documents are all in the public domain and popular editions have also been released by Skyhorse, Penguin, Barnes & Noble, and others.
The Supreme Court justices seem ready to allow Maryland parents with religious objections to opt their children out of classes with storybooks featuring gay and transgender characters, the New York Times reports. The complaint from parents of multiple faiths claimed that the books “violated the First Amendment’s protection of the free exercise of religion.” This case is one in a string of recent examples where the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of expanding the role of religion in public life.
Ed Nawotka writes for Publishers Weekly about how emerging tech can help the publishing industry as it advocates for AI licensing frameworks to protect authors. For example, the new firm Valent has developed technology to identify when and how much copyrighted material has been used to train an AI model. Louis Hunt, the cofounder and CEO of Valent, explains that Valent also has algorithms that can quantify how certain data could improve an AI model’s performance, which would give copyright holders leverage in licensing negotiations.
The Guardian reports on a new wave of literary parties in the U.K. that feature poetry performances and DJ sets. The Soho Reading series began in the summer of 2023 when Tom Willis, a writer and PhD student, wanted to create a social scene with “literature as the center.” Other literary event series that draw a similarly diverse crowd include New Work, hosted by writers Rachel Connolly and Isis O’Regan, and the popular live readings of The Toe Rag, a London-based quarterly DIY arts and culture newspaper.
Supreme court justices are considering certain picture books with LGBTQ+ themes after parents in Maryland claimed they have a religious right to withdraw their children from classes on days that stories with gay and transgender themes are discussed, the New York Times reports.
The District Court of Rhode Island held a motion hearing on April 18 in an effort to preserve the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Minority Business and Development Agency, and the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, Publishers Weekly reports. The lawsuit, which was filed by twenty-one attorneys general, seeks to restore funding to the agencies and avoid threats to grants that have already been awarded.
Author Neil Gaiman is seeking more than $500,000 from Caroline Wallner, one of the women who has come forward accusing him of sexual misconduct, New York magazine reports. Gaiman, who denies abusing Wallner, has filed a demand for arbitration, accusing Wallner of breaching the NDA she signed when she shared her story with the media.
Clare Mulroy writes for USA Today about the silent book clubs proliferating around the U.S. Though the name is a bit misleading, silent book clubs do not require participants to read the same book. Readers arrive to quietly read with other people. “The trend reflects a growing post-pandemic need to connect in person while also being mindful of social batteries,” Mulroy writes, adding that “Eventbrite shows a 223 percent increase in silent book club events from 2023 to 2024, especially in cities like Chicago, Indianapolis, New York City, Seattle, and Atlanta.”
The winners of the annual Publishing Triangle Awards, which celebrate LGBTQ+ literary excellence, were announced at the New School Thursday. The list of winners includes Blas Falconer, who won the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry for Rara Avis (Four Way Books) and Cass Donish, who won the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry for Your Dazzling Death (Knopf). Jiaming Tang won both the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ+ Fiction and the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction for Cinema Love (Dutton).
The ACLU of Tennessee filed a lawsuit on April 16 to stop book bans in Rutherford County, Publishers Weekly reports. In the past year, the Rutherford County Board of Education has removed or restricted more than 140 titles from school libraries. The lawsuit argues that book bans are a direct violation of students’ First Amendment rights.
Three hundred people in Chelsea, Michigan, formed a human chain to move thousands of books from the old location of Serendipity Books to its new site, the Washington Post reports. Bookstore owner Michelle Tuplin said she had the idea to create a “book brigade,” but did not expect so many community members to show up. The group relocated 9,100 books in under two hours and a video of the event has been viewed more than 1.6 million times on TikTok. The new Serendipity Books will open on April 26, which is also Independent Bookstore Day.
The New York Public Library has announced the finalists for the 2025 Young Lions Fiction Award: ‘Pemi Aguda for Ghostroots (Norton), Eliza Barry Callahan for The Hearing Test (Catapult), Alexander Sammartino for Last Acts (Scribner), Santiago Jose Sanchez for Hombrecito (Riverhead), and Karla Cornejo Villavicencio for Catalina (One World). A panel of judges will select the winner of this year’s $10,000 prize, which will be announced during a ceremony on June 12 at 7 PM EDT.
Alexandra Alter writes for the New York Times about the ethical quandaries of publishing Joan Didion’s journal entries about therapy, as they appear are in Notes to John, forthcoming from Knopf on April 22. The posthumous work collects journal entries she wrote after sessions with a psychiatrist, during which she discussed subjects such as alcoholism, adoption, depression, anxiety, guilt, and her complex relationship with her daughter, Quintana. The notes are sometimes addressed only to her husband, John Gregory Dunne, another factor that has sparked some fans and friends of Didion to wonder if the publication is invasive. “Didion was famously guarded,” Alter writes, but she was also “a meticulous note taker and record keeper who was savvy about the publishing industry; she likely knew that any literary documents she left behind could be released.”
Staffers at the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) are outraged over the Trump administration’s gutting and restructuring of the agency, Publishers Weekly reports. Only twelve employees of the original seventy-five remain—one of whom is Lisa Solomson, who is serving as acting deputy director of library services. Solomson is married to Matthew H. Solomson, a federal judge appointed by Trump during his first term. The remaining personnel do not have the capacity to distribute all existing grants or process incoming applications for funding, according to employees on leave from the agency and familiar with IMLS operations.
DOGE has taken over the federal grants website, Grants.gov, the NonProfit Times reports. DOGE staffers will now be able to review grant proposals and make decisions about distributing funds, according to the Washington Post.
Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt discusses rejuvenating the bookstore’s brand with CNN. He also discusses curating the collection of books in each store, the personal touches in every branch, and how the younger generation of readers continues to be drawn to classic novels in addition to books of the moment (for instance, romantasy titles).
Keziah Weir writes for Vanity Fair about how Meta AI staffers concluded that more than seven million books have no “economic value.” Meta, which used millions of pirated books to train its AI, is arguing that the company’s use of copyrighted materials falls under the legal doctrine of “fair use.” The Association of American Publishers has rejected this claim, stating in an amicus brief filed last week, “There is nothing transformative about the systematic copying and encoding of textual works, word by word, into an LLM. It does not involve criticism or commentary, provision of a search or indexing utility, software interoperability, or any other purpose recognized as transformative under fair use precedents.” Meta also claimed that the company does not see the point in compensating authors to license their books because “for there to be a market, there must be something of value to exchange, but none of Plaintiffs works has economic value, individually, as training data.”
Book subscription services, which curate books for readers, are starting to publish their own titles, Rhys Thomas reports for the Guardian. FairyLoot, a U.K. fantasy subscription box, announced a partnership with Transworld, a division of Penguin Random House in January, and last week, OwlCrate, a subscription service based in Canada, launched OwlCrate Press. Thomas writes that these services have “a guaranteed customer base, a strong sense of the titles that work for them, and the ability to create exclusive editions,” adding, “It’s a pretty powerful sales pitch to any bidding writer.”
With the off Broadway debut of his 1958 play The Swamp Dwellers, Wole Soyinka, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, reflects on his younger, more optimistic self in the New York Times. Now ninety years old, Soyinka revisits The Swamp Dwellers, which he wrote when he was twenty-four, two years before Nigeria’s independence. “That play now makes me recollect very vividly that eve of independence season when we were all gung-ho about the emergence of a unified society,” he says, adding, “I’ve lost that sense of achievable idealism.” But, he continues, “One never loses a picture, a projection of what you think your society can be. That’s what hurts.”
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has announced the 2025 Guggenheim fellows, which also marks the hundredth anniversary of the fellowship program. The grantees include Cynthia Cruz, francine j. harris, Richie Hofmann, Brandon D. Som, and others in Poetry; Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Miranda July, Nicole Krauss, Jonathan Lethem, and others in Fiction; and Sloane Crosley, Harold Holzer, Kristen Radtke, and Nathaniel Rich, among others in General Nonfiction.
Seven Stories Press has acquired Two Dollar Radio, Publishers Weekly reports. Two Dollar Radio, which is based in Columbus, Ohio, has approximately eighty titles in print, and is the fourth imprint of Seven Stories, which is based in New York City. Dan Simon, the publisher of Seven Stories, said both presses “are kind of alternative in the best sense: We’re not part of the club.” Eric Obenauf will remain in his role as publisher and editorial director of Two Dollar Radio.
The Association of American Publishers filed an amicus brief on April 11 arguing that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials to train its AI model fails to meet fair use standards, Publishers Weekly reports. The brief supports authors in their class action lawsuit against Meta and further dismisses the tech company’s claims that licensing options for that content was unavailable, stating, “the existence of an active market for AI training materials is indisputable.”
McNally Jackson will host a biannual book festival at its Seaport location in New York City, Publishers Lunch reports. The first festival will take place this spring from May 7 through June with the theme “archives, historiography, and legacies.” McNally Jackson founder and owner Sarah McNally says she hopes the festival will offer “more access to high-level intellectual conversations in the city” and extend publicity for books beyond the few weeks around a title’s publication. This spring’s festival will feature Parul Sehgal and Andrea Long Chu; Lincoln Michel, Helen Phillips, Chloe Cooper Jones, and Kevin Nguyen.
Mario Vargas Llosa, a Peruvian novelist who won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, died yesterday in Lima at eight-nine years old, the New York Times reports. In addition to fiction, Vargas Llosa wrote “essays that made him one of the most influential political commentators in the Spanish-speaking world,” according to the New York Times.
The Hurston/Wright Foundation is celebrating its thirty-fifth anniversary by rebranding its annual Legacy Awards as the Zora Awards, People reports. The new name of the award will also come with a larger cash prize of $20,000. The Zora Award for debut fiction celebrates gifted Black authors at the beginning of their careers. The finalists for the 2025 prize will be announced in August.
The New York Times looks at the books that were removed from, as well as the books that remain, on the shelves of the U.S. Naval Academy’s library following an order by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s office. Gone is Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings while two copies of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf remain. “The Trump administration’s decision to order the banning of certain books from the U.S. Naval Academy’s library is a case study in ideological censorship, alumni and academics say,” writes John Ismay.
The Mississippi Library Commission, which offers specialized research assistance to libraries in the state, has ordered the deletion of two research collections: the race relations database and the gender studies database, the Guardian reports. “The collections were stored in what’s called the Magnolia database, which is used by publicly funded schools, libraries, universities, and state agencies in Mississippi.” The commission’s executive director, Hulen Bivins, confirmed that the deletions were in response to the Trump administration’s recent actions against the Institute of Library and Museum Services. “We may lose a lot of materials,” Bivins told the Guardian.
The Cleveland Foundation recently announced the winners of the 2025 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. A jury chaired by Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Natasha Trethewey selected this year’s group of winners: Janice N. Harrington for the poetry collection Yard Show, Danzy Senna for the novel Colored Television, Tessa Hulls for the memoir Feeding Ghosts, and John Swanson Jacobs for The United States Governed By Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery; A Rediscovered Narrative, With a Full Biography, edited by Jonathan D. S. Schroeder. The winners each receive $10,000. Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa will also receive the Lifetime Achievement Award. All the winners will be honored at an awards ceremony on September 19 in Cleveland.
Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Andrea Long Chu, author of the new essay collection Authority (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), talks with Brittany Luse of NPR’s It’s Been a Minute about “what kind of authority critics have, and why we might need to rethink what criticism should do for us.”
Two years after wildfires on the Hawai‘i island of Maui destroyed the town of Lāhainā, including the Lāhainā Public Library, and killed more than a hundred people, Lisa Peet of Library Journal talks with Jessica Gleason, bookmobile librarian at the Wailuku Public Library, and Lāhainā branch manager Chadde Holbron about the Maui Holoholo Bookmobile, which supported Maui’s West Coast community after the fires. “We aren’t emergency responders, but we are part of the state government, and we have a role to play,” says Gleason. “And because we have this beautiful bookmobile, we were able to have the flexibility to adjust.”
At a ceremony in New York City last night the Whiting Foundation announced the ten winners of the 2025 Whiting Awards. The $50,000 prizes are designed “to recognize excellence and promise in a spectrum of emerging talent, giving most winners the chance to devote themselves full time to their own writing, or to take bold new risks in their work.” The winners in poetry are Karisma Price and Annie Wenstrup; the winners in fiction are Elwin Cotman, Emil Ferris, Samuel Kọ́láwọlé, Claire Luchette, and Shubha Sunder; the winners in nonfiction are Aisha Sabatini Sloan and Sofi Thanhauser; and the winner in drama is Liza Birkenmeier. “These writers demonstrate astounding range; each has invented the tools they needed to carve out their narratives and worlds,” said Courtney Hodell, Whiting’s Director of Literary Programs. “Taken as a whole, their work shows a sharply honed sensitivity to our history, both individual and collective, and a passionate curiosity as to where a deeper understanding of that history can take us.” The Whiting Awards, established in 1985 by the Whiting Foundation, remain one of the most esteemed and largest monetary gifts for emerging writers.
On the occassion of this week’s centennial celebration of The Great Gatsby’s publication, Maureen Corrigan writes in the Washington Post about how F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel was not popular during the author’s lifetime. “Eight months before he died,” Corrigan writes, “Fitzgerald pleaded with his editor at Scribner’s, the legendary Maxwell Perkins, to promote the book. ‘Would a popular reissue in that series with a preface not by me but by one of its admirers—I can maybe pick one—make it a favorite with class rooms, profs, lovers of English prose—anybody,’ he asked in a letter.”
A new Thomas Pynchon novel, Shadow Ticket, will be published later this year, the New York Times reports. The novel is Pynchon’s first in more than a decade and is set in 1932 during the Great Depression. Shadow Ticket, which will be released on October 7 by Penguin Press, follows a private eye named Hicks McTaggart whose mission to find the heir to a Wisconsin cheese empire goes sideways when he ends up on a trans-Atlantic Ocean liner and then in Hungary.
Robert Caro, Salman Rushdie, and Sandra Cisneros were honored Monday night in New York City at an Authors Guild gala that celebrated the written word and its essential role in preserving democracy, the Associated Press reports.
The American Library Association and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, whose members include museum and library workers, have sued Keith Sonderling, the acting director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) in addition to the IMLS itself; President Trump; and U.S. DOGE Service acting administrator Amy Gleason, in addition to DOGE itself, Publishers Weekly reports. The lawsuit argues that the Trump administration’s recent actions attempting to defund and shutter the IMLS are both illegal and unconstitutional.
Book bans at military service academies have sparked criticism from Democrats in Congress, USA Today reports. The Pentagon has implemented Trump’s order to eliminate materials that could be considered promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Random House, 1969) by Maya Angelou was one of almost four hundred books removed from the Naval Academy’s library. Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee called the incident “an alarming return to McCarthy-era censorship” in a drafted letter to the military academies who removed the books.
Donovan Arthen, the interim executive director of Orion, has announced that Neal Thompson will be the magazine’s new publisher. Thompson is an author, journalist, editor, and literary arts funder. About his new appointment, Thompson said, “The work we do and the stories we tell are more important than ever. During challenging times—economically, politically, environmentally—we want readers to find comfort and inspiration in our pages, and we aspire to be an urgent and eloquent voice for the planet and all its creatures.”
Katrine Øgaard Jensen has been named the executive director of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA). Jensen joins ALTA from the Authors Guild, where she served as executive administrator and project manager.
Jeff O’Neal writes for Book Riot about Publishers Weekly’s decision to charge for review submissions. “[I]n this day and age of big tech platform media dominance, finding a new, sustainable, non-advertising revenue source is both clever and necessary.” He adds that the new policy “also has the secondary effect (perhaps primary?) of reducing the number of submissions.” Especially as AI-generated books flood the marketplace, he points out, the new guidelines will limit the number of books submitted for review consideration.
Attorneys general from twenty-one states have sued the Trump administration over its efforts to dismantle the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and six other federal agencies, Publishers Weekly reports. The lawsuit requests an emergency temporary restraining order that would invalidate the March 14 executive order that calls for the elimination of IMLS “to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.” The plaintiffs include attorneys general from four states that Trump won in the 2024 election: Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin.
The shortlist for the International Booker Prize has been announced, the New York Times reports. The list includes On the Calculation of Volume: 1 (Faber) by Solvej Balle, translated from the Danish by Barbara J. Haveland; Perfection (Fitzcarraldo Editions) by Vincenzo Latronico, translated from the Italian by Sophie Hughes; Small Boat (Small Axes) by Vincent Delecroix, translated from the French by Helen Stevenson; Under the Eye of the Big Bird (Granta Books) by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from the Japanese by Asa Yoneda; Heart Lamp (And Other Stories) by Banu Mushtaq, translated from the Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi; and A Leopard-Skin Hat (Lolli Editions) by Anne Serre, translated from the French by Mark Hutchinson.
The Naval Academy has removed nearly four hundred books that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) from its library, the Hill reports. A spokesperson for the Navy confirmed that the books were removed “in order to ensure compliance with all directives outlined in executive orders issued by the President.”
On April 3, a federal judge in Rhode Island denied a motion to block the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) from “prohibiting grant recipients from using grant funding to promote ‘gender ideology’ as defined by President Donald Trump in an executive order issued on January 20,” Publishers Weekly reports. The judge noted that following the filing of the lawsuit, the NEA retracted its implementation of the executive order, “pending further administrative review.” In a statement, ACLU senior staff attorney Vera Eidelman said that the opinion “makes clear that the NEA cannot lawfully reimpose its viewpoint-based eligibility bar.”
For the time being, standard printed books are exempt from the Trump Administration’s new tariffs, Publishers Lunch reports. However, printing involves other imported materials, like paper, that will be subject to price increases.
Boris Kachka writes for the Atlantic about the future of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) in Trump’s America. Though many universities, law firms, and corporations are capitulating to Trump’s demands, AWP’s executive director, Michelle Aielli, said that AWP will remain steadfast in its goals: “As of right now, the plan is not to scrub our website, not to change words, and, more importantly, not to change our mission,” she said. Anticipating the loss of a significant federal grant, the organization will focus on raising funding elsewhere.
Kevin Young, who has led the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. since 2021, stepped down as director of the museum on April 4, the New York Times reports. In an announcement, the museum said that Young wanted to focus on his writing; he remains the poetry editor of the New Yorker. In an executive order last month, Trump attacked the Smithsonian Museum network for coming “under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology,” though it was reported that Young was already on personal leave at that time.
Denise Lyons writes for Library Journal about the role libraries play in disaster preparedness and recovery. Because public libraries are often located in central areas, they are strategic partners during crises, offering shelter and other basic needs during severe weather, coordinating efforts to donate materials, and collecting information and resources to distribute to their communities.
Four of the big five publishers—Hachette Book Group, Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Random House, and Simon & Schuster—and Sourcebooks sent a letter asking Congress to defend libraries as federal library grant funding ends, Publishers Weekly reports. The letter asks Congress to “reject” Trump’s March 14 executive order calling for the elimination of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). In their letter, the publishers maintain that “defunding libraries would result in mass closures and the destruction of a system that today benefits millions of Americans,” despite IMLS funding representing “just 0.003 percent of the federal budget.”
Twelve U.S. copyright cases against OpenAI and Microsoft have been combined in New York, even though most of the authors and newspapers suing the tech companies were opposed to centralization, the Guardian reports. The U.S. judicial panel on multidistrict litigation said that centralization will “allow a single judge to coordinate discovery, streamline pretrial proceedings, and eliminate inconsistent rulings.” Authors Ta-Nehisi Coates, Michael Chabon, Junot Díaz, and the comedian Sarah Silverman are among the authors whose cases will be transferred from California to New York and joined with cases brought by the New York Times as well as other authors, including John Grisham, George Saunders, and Jonathan Franzen.
On March 24, Publishers Weekly started charging $25 for every book submitted for review consideration in the weekly trade magazine. The new fee does not guarantee a review but “helps offset a small percentage of the costs of processing the large number of titles submitted to PW each year,” according to the announcement.
Eve Bridburg, the founder and executive director of GrubStreet, is stepping down from her role at the end of 2025. Bridburg served as executive director for fifteen years and founded GrubStreet twenty-eight years ago. In a statement posted to GrubStreet’s website she wrote, “Our mission and vision have never mattered more. In moments like this—when human and civil rights are under attack and polarization is deepening—we need writers to help us understand the world, frame and reframe the issues, and imagine new possibilities.”
Kevin Young, the director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., has been on leave since March 14, two weeks before Trump targeted the Smithsonian Museum network with an executive order, the Guardian reports. Trump’s order called for the end of what he described as “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology” within the Smithsonian.
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.”
