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.”

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.