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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.
The Washington Post’s Sophia Nguyen writes about author Zadie Smith’s ability to get rid of physical copies of books after she has read them. Notable exceptions include certain philosophy titles, Italian dictionaries, and books gifted to her by family. “I feel like the record of your books are in the books you write, if you’re a writer,” she says.
Over thirty years, 40 percent of publishing jobs disappeared, Publishers Weekly reports. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of people employed in book publishing in the United States fell to 54,822 in 2023, down from 91,000 in 1997. New technology, consolidation, and outsourced labor are all cited as possible reasons for downsizing in the industry.
Author and writing teacher Tom Spanbauer has died at age seventy-eight, Willamette Week reports. Spanbauer was known for mentoring many local Portland authors, including Monica Drake, Suzy Vitello, and Chuck Palahniuk, through his “Dangerous Writing” workshops. More than fifty of his former students went on to publish novels or memoirs.
Verso Books is holding a Kickstarter campaign to help get its books into the U.K. trade market, Publishers Weekly reports. In a thread posted on X, Verso explained that Marston Book Services, a subsidiary of United Independent Distributors, which went bankrupt over the summer, owes the press almost £1 million for book sales stretching back to January.
Aspen Words, the literary arm of the Aspen Institute, is partnering with Book of the Month to launch the Aspen Literary Festival, Publishers Weekly reports. The inaugural festival is scheduled to take place September 26 to September 28 in Aspen, Colorado. More than forty authors will participate in conversations, book signings, and other activities inspired by books.
Morgan Talty discusses his debut novel, Fire Exit (Tin House, 2024), the politics of indigeneity, blood quantum, colonization, and the manipulation of stories with Electric Literature.“Let’s say colonizers wipe out languages, stories, everything that makes a culture, a culture, yet still politically treat it as an entity,” Talty says. “It’s like, we die but we don’t die. We’re still here.” He asks, “How do we reclaim our identity then?” (Read Ten Questions for Morgan Talty.)
Esquire reports on the ten most banned books in America in 2023, including The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, and This Book Is Gay by Juno Dawson.
Jeanine Cummins, the author of the novel American Dirt, which faced intense criticism over cultural appropriation after its publication by Flatiron Books in 2020, is publishing a new novel about three women coping with the aftermath of a hurricane in Puerto Rico, the Washington Post reports. Speak to Me of Home is forthcoming from Henry Holt in May 2025.
Data from the American Library Association (ALA) shows that attempts to censor books and materials in libraries have slowed in 2024, Publishers Weekly reports. Between January 1 and August 31, 2024, ALA tracked 414 challenges to censor library materials and services that amounted to 1,128 unique titles challenged. That figure is down from 695 cases and 1,915 unique titles challenged during the same period last year. The report noted that censorship efforts remain far above levels tracked prior to 2020 and new data from PEN America found censorship in schools is still surging.
Michelle Aielli has been named interim executive director of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) following the retirement of executive director Cynthia Sherman in June. Aielli has over twenty-five years of experience in book publishing and most recently worked as the vice president and publishing director of Hachette Books at Hachette Book Group. Meanwhile, the AWP board of directors has launched a national search for a permanent executive director.
Li-Young Lee, whose first poetry collection in a decade, The Invention of the Darling, was published by W. W. Norton in May, discusses the spiritual practice of poetry in an interview with Electric Literature. “Poetry is the logic of all logic,” he says. “And it’s a logic beyond reason. It’s the logic of God. It’s the logic of my mother.”
A panel discussion planned for Saturday as part of the Albany Book Festival, sponsored by the New York State Writers Institute, was canceled after two of the authors boycotted the event due to the planned participation of Elisa Albert, WAMC reports. In an e-mail, the organizers told Albert that two of the three authors who were scheduled to appear with Albert “don’t want to be on a panel with a ‘Zionist.’”
New state laws are fueling a surge in book bans, the New York Times reports. State and local governments are banning books at rates far higher than before the pandemic, according to two advocacy groups. PEN America reported that over 10,000 books were removed from schools and libraries, at least temporarily, last year. About 80 percent of those bans came just from Florida and Iowa.
Arundhati Roy’s first memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, will be published in September 2025 by Scribner, the Associated Press reports. Roy, the author of the Booker Prize–winning novel The God of Small Things, said in a statement that she began working on the book after her mother’s death in September 2022.
Penguin Random House has appointed Rosalie (Rosie) Stewart as its senior manager for public policy, a role created to help battle book bans, Publishers Weekly reports. Stewart was most recently the manager of grassroots communications for the American Library Association’s Public Policy and Advocacy Office, and previously cofounded MOVE Texas (Mobilize, Organize, Vote, Empower), an organization focused on empowering underrepresented youth communities through civic engagement, issue advocacy, and leadership development.
Banned Books Week, which was launched in 1982 in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in libraries, bookstores, and schools, will be observed starting September 22. The theme of this year’s week-long series of events is Freed Between the Lines, and Banned Books Week invites librarians, educators, authors, publishers, booksellers, and readers of all types to host events and participate.
The Bay Area Book Festival (BABF) announced the appointment of J. K. Fowler as its new executive director. Fowler previously served as the founder and executive director of Nomadic Press, an Oakland-based nonprofit publisher committed to platforming marginalized voices. The BABF will celebrate its eleventh anniversary this spring.
Thomas Gebremedhin considers what is missing from the discourse on diversity in publishing in an essay for Literary Hub. “It has been uncomfortable to read stories about Black editors that hinge entirely on their subjects’ race, flattening individuals and cohorts, effacing their sensibilities. I feel abridged.” He adds, “It is essential that our conversations surrounding the dearth of people of color in publishing attempt to highlight our dimension as well as the full and complicated scope of the crisis in the industry.”
Henry Hoke, the author of five books, including the novel Open Throat, published in 2023 by MCD, an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and the memoir Sticker (Bloomsbury, 2022), discusses finding representation, balancing the work of publishing with creative life, and being honest about privilege in an interview with the Creative Independent. “I didn’t set out to even work with a big five publisher,” Hoke says. “I didn’t think that was my world because of what I do and how I do it and who I looked up to.” He adds: “Connecting with people through art is creative success to me.”
Helen Phillips discusses her new novel, Hum, which takes place in a near-future city with the urgent backdrop of climate change and ubiquitous artificial intelligence, at the Millions. Phillips says she is not intimidated by the current state of machine learning technology. “For me, some of the intrigue and fascination with artificial intelligence is very much in the realm of fantasy,” she says, “because it seems that, so far, algorithms tend to accelerate bias and emphasize the worst aspects of human behavior.” Her curiosity is different: “But if there was some way to have an artificial intelligence that was able to consolidate the wisdom, the knowledge, the ethical and philosophical understandings, and actually enact those principles, which, as humans, we find very hard to enact, what would that be like?”
Academic publishers Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer, Wiley, Sage Publications, Taylor & Francis, and Springer Nature are being sued over the peer review process, which does not compensate scholars for services, Publishers Weekly reports. The academics and researchers who filed the antitrust suit claim the major publishers are exploiting the peer review process for their own financial gain.
Deesha Philyaw discusses truth-telling, how a corporate job can help a writer creatively, and the importance of mentorship and community in a conversation with the Creative Independent. “I would not have a writing career if I did not have community and mentors,” Philyaw says.
Andrea Lawlor writes about rereading Virginia Woolf’s Orlando in an essay for Electric Literature. “I felt one way at first, I feel differently now, I will likely feel a new way in the future,” Lawlor writes. “Like Woolf, I will resist explanation and merely say that reading, like life, is subject to revision.”
In an essay for Poetry magazine, Johannes Göransson considers the merits of mimicry in translation. “Mimicry allows us to think about translation in terms beyond mastery, competence, and ‘naturalness,’” he writes. “We need a model of translation that does not seek to contain the noise and transformations caused by translation, but instead finds poetry in this transgressive circulation.”
The shortlist for the Booker Prize 2024 has been announced, Publishers Weekly reports. The list includes Yael van der Wouden, the first Dutch writer to be shortlisted for the prize; Charlotte Wood, the first Australian to make the shortlist in ten years; as well as British, Canadian, and American authors. The winner will be announced at an award ceremony on November 12 in London.
Nicole Graev Lipson interviews Jerald Walker about his new essay collection, Magically Black and Other Essays, blending personal revelation and cultural critique to examine Black American life, in the Los Angeles Review of Books. “This book is about racial identity,” Walker explains, “how it’s formed and created, how you can learn to be a race, and how you can unlearn what race means through the course of a lifetime.”
An early version of William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies that opens with the boys being evacuated in the midst of a nuclear war, and their plane shot down in an aerial battle, will be part of an exhibition marking seventy years since the novel’s publication, the Guardian reports. Golding’s manuscripts, notebooks and letters will be on display at the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum at the University of Exeter in England later this month.
Columbia College Chicago is considering cutting eighteen “underperforming” majors from curriculum, NBC Chicago reports. The list of programs under consideration includes the MFA in Fine Arts, BA in Creative Writing, and Cultural Studies. A final list of program changes, cuts and “consolidations” will be announced in early 2025.
A school district in northeast Florida must return three dozen titles to libraries as part of a settlement with students and parents who sued over what they said was an unlawful decision to limit access to dozens of books containing LGBTQ+ content, the Associated Press reports.
In a profile in the New Yorker, Richard Powers discusses his new novel, Playground, and its environmentalist message to resist human exceptionalism. While his 2018 novel, The Overstory, was focused on trees, his latest novel concerns the sea. Inspired by a book on coral reefs his late sister gifted him on his tenth birthday, Powers set out to write a novel that examined how much the oceans have transformed in the past five decades. “The largest part of the planet exhausted,” he writes, “before it was even explored.” (For more about Powers, read “A Talk in the Woods: Barbara Kingsolver and Richard Powers” in the November/December 2018 issue.)
The National Book Foundation announced the longlist for the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction. The list includes works by Hisham Matar, Percival Everett, Kaveh Akbar, and others. Winners will be announced at the 75th National Book Awards ceremony on Wednesday, November 20.
Betsy Gleick, who led Algonquin Books as its publisher for eight years, and an unspecified number of Algonquin staff will be let go as part of the ongoing reorganization of Workman Publishing by Hachette Book Group (HBG), Publishers Weekly reports. Founded in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in 1983, Algonquin was acquired by Workman in 1989, which was then acquired by HBG in 2021.
The National Book Foundation has announced the longlist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. Among the authors on the list are Hanif Abdurraqib for There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension, Salman Rushdie for Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, and Deborah Jackson Taffa for Whiskey Tender. Winners will be announced at the 75th National Book Awards ceremony on Wednesday, November 20.
Oxford University Press (OUP) has laid off its U.S./North America design team and U.S. content transformation and standards team, Publishers Weekly reports. The OUP USA Guild said the layoffs included thirteen members of its bargaining unit, and come less than one month after the union ratified its first collective bargaining agreement.
The National Book Foundation has announced the longlist for the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry. The list includes poets at all stages of their publishing careers, and nine of the ten poets are first-time National Book Award honorees, including Fady Joudah and Diane Seuss. Winners will be announced at the 75th National Book Awards ceremony on Wednesday, November 20.
Nick Long discusses how he designed the sound for the audiobook adaptation of Darrin Bell’s graphic memoir The Talk (Henry Holt, 2023) with Publishers Weekly. Long explains that the audio effects “had to both complement and extend the spoken words—in addition to reflecting the absent images.”
A major Canadian literary award has dropped the reference to its sponsor, Scotiabank, from its name following months of protests over the bank’s investments in Elbit Systems, which supplies military equipment to Israel’s military, the Guardian reports. The Giller Prize, formerly known as the Scotiabank Giller Prize, will keep the bank as its main sponsor despite the rebrand. The change comes after more than thirty authors whose books would have been eligible for the 2024 Giller Prize withdrew their work from consideration in a collective statement published in July. In mid-2023, Scotiabank’s 1832 Asset Management was the third largest shareholder in Elbit Systems, and as of mid-August, the asset manager is the seventh largest shareholder, though they deny the protests influenced the reduction of their stake.
Tim O’Connell has been promoted from vice president and editorial director of fiction at the flagship Simon & Schuster imprint to vice president and publisher of Saga Press, the publisher’s speculative fiction imprint, Publishers Weekly reports. O’Connell will continue to acquire literary fiction and select nonfiction at Saga Press, which is approaching its tenth anniversary.
Former Doubleday executive editor Gerald Howard writes for the New York Times about Wilfrid Sheed's 1966 novel, Office Politics, and how it prepared Howard for his life in books. “The core insight I gained from my second reading of Office Politics was that if I thought I could stand at a remove from my place of employment and regard it as a kind of diorama or spectacle, I was deluding myself,” Howard writes. “As Rilke wrote, in a very different context: All this seems to require us. I was going to have to work with the materials at hand, pedestrian and unpromising as they might seem, to make of my life and career something meaningful. This was no small gift of self-knowledge to receive from a novel.”
The National Book Foundation has announced the longlist for translated literature, which includes titles originally published in Arabic, Danish, French, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, and Swedish. Winners will be announced at the 75th National Book Awards ceremony on Wednesday, November 20.
Maggie Doherty writes for the New Yorker about Seamus Heaney and how he struggled to reconcile his vision of poetry with the brutality of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Heaney wanted to honor the “secret and natural” elements of poetry while acknowledging the violent realities of the world around him. “The public poet concerned himself with the polis and its problems,” Doherty writes.
Elizabeth Harris interviews Liane Moriarty, author of eight best-sellers, including Big Little Lies (Penguin, 2014), for the New York Times. Moriarty has sold over twenty million books and several of her novels have been adapted for television, but the author is not interested in becoming a “brand,” she says.
In an interview with Electric Literature, Vietnamese German author Khuê Phạm discusses her debut novel, Brothers and Ghosts (Scribe, 2024), translated by Charles Hawley and Daryl Lindsey. The book explores how a Vietnamese diaspora family remains ensconced in historical trauma. “The dark experiences of being a refugee, of being in a country at war, they’re covered in silence,” Phạm says, “but somehow that silence is passed on from one generation to the next.”
For the By the Book series from the New York Times, Garth Greenwell discusses how foundational texts, such as James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, can be both lifesaving to queer people as well as homophobic. Greenwell seeks “more productive, less facile conversations about ‘affirming’ literature and ‘positive representation.’”
Katy Waldman writes about the “literary bratdom” trend in contemporary fiction for the New Yorker. Focusing on books by the Zoomer and young millennial writers Gabriel Smith, Frankie Barnet, and Honor Levy, Waldman analyzes protagonists who identify as “brats” are “exuberantly ‘unlikable’” and jaded about the status quo.
Aaron Coleman writes about the Cuban poet Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista and his under-examined masterpiece, The Great Zoo, for Poetry magazine. Coleman’s English translation of the collection, which originally appeared in Spanish in 1967, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press in October.
A new exhibition at New York City’s Morgan Library & Museum will focus on the life and career of its inaugural director, Belle da Costa Greene, honoring the centennial of her appointment, Fine Books & Collections reports. The exhibition, which will run from October 25 to May 4, 2025, will trace her roots in a predominantly Black community in Washington D.C., to her career at the helm of the library, where she was an authority on illuminated manuscripts.
Big publishers saw earnings rebound in the first half of 2024, Publishers Weekly reports. The news of first-half profit gains for HarperCollins, Lagardère Publishing, and Penguin Random House comes after extensive restructuring at all three companies that included job cuts.
Little Free Library has produced an interactive map in collaboration with the American Library Association and PEN America in response to the nationwide surge in efforts to ban books from public and school libraries, Publishers Weekly reports. The map includes two main features: highlights, indicating where book bans are in effect at the state and county levels, and pinpoints, indicating the locations of Little Free Library’s book-sharing containers. The purpose of the initiative is to raise awareness about book banning and to leverage little free libraries to help distribute restricted books.
The National Book Foundation will present the 2024 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (DCAL) to Barbara Kingsolver at the 75th National Book Awards ceremony on November 20. Author of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, investigative journalism, and science writing, Kingsolver has been honored by the American Booksellers Association, the American Library Association, the James Beard Foundation, and the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, among others. Her most recent novel, Demon Copperhead, won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Brendan Chambers puts Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism (Verso Books, 2024) in conversation with Daniel Wright’s The Grounds of the Novel (Stanford University Press, 2024) in an essay for Public Books on the value of literary theory. “To them,” Chambers writes, “literary theory can be either avant-garde or lyric, a tool for stepping back from the world or for more fully inhabiting it. Even as crises multiply, they assert that theory remains valuable.”
The New York Public Library will be opening a new exhibition on Lord Byron tomorrow, September 7. The exhibition explores the life of Byron (1788-1824) and features the cantos of Don Juan and other literary manuscripts, a portrait by Thomas Hargreaves, and letters from Byron’s mother, friends, and mistresses.
NaNoWriMo, an annual challenge in which participants write a novel of at least 50,000 words in one month, has refused to “explicitly support” or “explicitly condemn” the use of AI assistance, the Atlantic reports. Many participants were angry at the organization’s decision but Gal Beckerman, a staff writer at the Atlantic, does not mind: “The world needs fewer novels, certainly fewer novels that have been written in a month,” he writes. “And artificial intelligence is itchy for distractions; we need to give the robots something to do before they start messing with nuclear codes or Social Security numbers.”
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld a March 2023 court decision finding Internet Archive’s program to scan and lend print library books is copyright infringement, Publishers Weekly reports. Judge John G. Koeltl forcefully rejected the Internet Archive’s fair use defense and concluded that the organization’s use of the Works is “not transformative” as their counsel argued.
The Black List, an annual survey of Hollywood’s best unproduced screenplays, founded in 2005 by Franklin Leonard, is expanding into publishing, the New York Times reports. Leonard hired Randy Winston, the former director of writing programs at the Center for Fiction, to oversee the Black List’s development of a team to read and evaluate manuscripts. Like screenwriters who use the site, fiction writers can create a public profile on the Black List for free. They can post a novel-length unpublished or self-published manuscript on the site for a monthly fee of $30, and receive professional feedback on the first one hundred pages of their manuscript for $150.
In an interview with Renee H. Shea in World Literature Today, Threa Almontaser discusses her collection The Wild Fox of Yemen (Graywolf, 2021), which received the Walt Whitman Award for best first book in 2020, her approach to craft, and her belief in poetry as a tool for social justice. “Poetry empowers hope,” Almontaser says. “And hope empowers the movement.”
The National Book Foundation announced it will present the 2024 Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community to W. Paul Coates at the 75th National Book Awards ceremony on November 20. Founder of Black Classic Press and BCP Digital Printing, Coates has published original works by authors such as Amiri Baraka, Bobby Seale, and W. E. B. Du Bois.
Ledia Xhoga, whose debut novel, Misinterpretation, was published yesterday by Tin House Books, discusses translation, migration, and writing in two languages at once with Electric Literature. “The translations, interpretations, everything—it happens because you are on a border,” Xhoga says. “That’s your reality, so that’s where you have to exist.”
On September 7 the Harlem Book Fair will celebrate 26 years under the theme of “literary revolution,” according to Publishers Weekly. Founder and publisher Max Rodriguez says the event is intended as a “rebirth” of the historically Black neighborhood’s literary lineage. Rodriguez planned to shutter the event after last year’s event, but with additional support from publishing veteran Yona Deshommes, the fair is back with a global focus, fourteen panels, and roughly one hundred exhibitors. It has also partnered with Harlem’s own Caribbean Cultural Center Diaspora Institute (CCCDI), and authors of Haitian backgrounds will be prominently featured in the programming.
PEN America reports that Russia’s crackdown on free expression is escalating: Three independent publishing projects and two small resellers were added to a list of prohibited websites and accused of publishing content containing “fake information” about Russia’s war in Ukraine, “LGBT propaganda,” and discrediting Russian government bodies or its Armed Forces.
Fewer books are published during the fall of a presidental election, the Washington Post reports. It is harder for authors to book promotional media appearances or garner attention from social media influencers and book bloggers with the news cycle around an election. Christina Ward, vice president and editor at the publisher Feral House, described publishing at the peak of an election cycle as “an unforced error.”
More than 180 council-run libraries have either closed or been handed over to volunteer groups in the UK since 2016, the BBC reports. A third of those remaining have had their hours reduced and at least three councils have at least halved their supply since 2016. Many of these libraries provided additional services besides book-lending, including literacy clubs, computer access, and warm spaces for people struggling with fuel poverty in winter.
Julian Lucas writes for the New Yorker about the novelist Danzy Senna’s humorous approach to the way biracial people are presented, questioned, overlooked, and exoticized in America. “The worst version of me would be writing about biracials in a respectful way,” Senna told Lucas. “I get to make fun of us incessantly.”
