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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.
Orion, the quarterly literary magazine focusing on nature, culture, and place, announced that Amy Brady is stepping down from her role as executive director. The magazine’s director of finance and operations, Donovan Arthen, will step forward to serve as interim executive director. On the editorial side, editor in chief Sumanth Prabhaker will transition to the role of editor-at-large; Tajja Isen, former editor in chief of Catapult, will serve as interim editor in chief of Orion.
The National Book Foundation, which administers the National Book Awards, today announced the election of three new board members: Jonathan Karp, president and CEO of Simon & Schuster; Peggy Koenig, chair emeritus of private equity firm Abry Partners; and Jahm Najafi, CEO of the Najafi Companies, a private investment firm.
Since Ukraine’s war with Russia began in early 2022, Ukrainian publishers have released more than 120 new “trauma-informed books to help children and teenagers cope with living through war,” reports the Conversation.
The Washington Post offers advice for how to handle an insufferable book-club member.
Hachette Book Group has laid off several editorial staff members of Little, Brown, reports Publishers Weekly, including vice president and executive editor Tracy Sherrod and senior editors Jean Garnett, Ben George, and Pronoy Sarkar.
Costco, one of the biggest retailers in the world, will stop selling books next year, except during the holiday season from September through December, reports the New York Times. “The decision could be a significant setback for publishers at a moment when the industry is facing stagnant print sales and publishing houses are struggling to find ways to reach customers who have migrated online.”
The Harper Group is launching a new nonfiction imprint called Harper Influence, reports Publishers Weekly. The imprint is geared toward a broad audience: “Whether in the fields of entertainment, science, medicine, nature, music, lifestyle, spirituality, cooking, design, or news-driven narratives, the defining theme of the list will be cultural impact and relevance.”
The Poetry Foundation has awarded more than $1.5 million in grant funding to fifty-four nonprofit organizations and presses, including the Academy of American Poets, Alice James Books, CantoMundo, Cave Canem, the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses, MacDowell Foundation, Nightboat Books, and Poets House, among other organizations listed in the announcement.
Kiley Reid, author of Come and Get It and Such a Fun Age, talks with the Creative Independent about day jobs, creativity, and writing about money.
Canada’s Griffin Poetry Prize will be awarded at a ceremony tonight, reports the Canadian Press. Shortlist finalists for the $130,000 prize include U.S.-based poets Jorie Graham for To 2040, Ann Lauterbach for Door, and Ishion Hutchinson, a Jamaican-born poet who teaches at Cornell University, for School of Instructions. Read about major changes to the prestigious award in Poets & Writers Magazine.
Three of the Big Five Publishers and hundreds of other signatories have signed an open letter by PEN America protesting new education standards in South Carolina “that could lead to the removal of classic and critically acclaimed contemporary novels from the state’s public schools simply for including a sexual reference,” reports Publishers Weekly.
In the New York Times author Margaret Renkl contemplates the pleasures and perils of rereading later in life a book beloved in one’s youth.
LGBTQ Pride Month is in full swing, and Electric Literature has a list of sixty-five queer books to help readers celebrate.
A documentary about Salman Rushdie, based on his new memoir, Knife: Meditations on an Attempted Murder, is in development, reports the Guardian. The film will include “never-before-seen personal footage shot by his wife Rachel Eliza Griffiths,” a poet.
Digital audiobooks are selling well this year, continuing a growth trend, reports Publishers Weekly. Spotify’s recent move to start selling audiobooks seems to be playing a big part in sales gains—but concerns about compensation to authors for their audiobook titles remain.
The Booker Prizes shares titles nominated for its prestigious award that were initially rejected by publishers, including Shuggie Bain, the 2020 winner of the Booker Prize, which was rejected more than forty times before being accepted for publication.
Franz Kafka died exactly one hundred years ago, on June 3, 1924. Later this month a letter by the author of The Metamorphosis about his struggle to write while battling ill health will be up for auction at Sotheby’s in London, reports the Guardian. The New York Times recently considered Kafka’s “very online afterlife,” dubbing him “a pop idol of digital alienation.”
The Washington Post’s editorial-initiatives manager considers the importance of getting books to people in prison.
Readers from Seattle, Idaho, and Florida traveled to Portland, Oregon, this past weekend to buy books at a two-day warehouse sale by Powell’s Books, widely considered to be the largest indie new and used bookstore in the United States. Oregon Public Broadcasting reports from the sale, where patrons had their choice of thirty thousand surplus books, with hardcovers as low as $3.
This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Naropa University and the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado. Boulder Weekly speaks with Anne Waldman, the artistic director of Naropa’s annual summer writing program, about her new book, Tendril: A Meeting of Two Minds, which reflects on the foundation of the poetry school in 1974.
The Romance Writers of America (RWA) filed for bankruptcy this week due to a sharp decline in membership and divides within the organization over equity and inclusion, reports the Guardian. “In bankruptcy filings, RWA president Mary Ann Jock attributed the loss of the first 7,000 members to ‘disputes concerning diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) issues between some members of a prior RWA board and others in the larger romance writing community,’ and said the group lost additional members as its annual conferences were cancelled during the pandemic.”
The Washington Post is marking the National Book Awards’ seventy-fifth anniversary this year with a series of essays reflecting on the prizes and literary culture in the United States. In today’s entry novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen considers how the inaugural National Book Awards “reflected 1950s America.”
NPR’s Wild Card speaks with U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón.
In the Atlantic Damon Beres considers “a devil’s bargain” between publishers—including the Atlantic—and AI companies such as OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. “In practice, this means that users of ChatGPT, say, might type in a question and receive an answer that briefly quotes an Atlantic story;” the quote “will be accompanied by a citation and a link to the original source.”
The Austin Chronicle of Austin, Texas, takes readers “inside the small presses driving Austin’s literary scene.”
Esquire considers why debut books are reportedly “harder to launch” nowadays than in years past. “[D]ebut novelists need three key publicity achievements to ‘break out’: one, a major book club; two, a boost from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Indie Next, and/or Book of the Month; and three, a major profile.”
On Literary Hub Brittany Allen interviews one of the “architects” of the New York War Crimes (NYWC), a protest newspaper developed “adjacent to Writers Against the War on Gaza,” a literary activist organization in solidarity with Palestinians during the war in Gaza. The NYWC aims to critique war coverage by the New York Times with a “two-pronged strategy: delegitimize the paper of record, while shining a light on its omissions,” the anonymous interviewee told Allen. “For the time being, the NYWC editorial team does prefer to remain obscure. ... An anonymized masthead honors the paper’s collective structure.”
The New York Times unpacks how a self-published book, The Shadow Work Journal: A Guide to Integrate and Transcend Your Shadows by Keila Shaheen, became a best-seller, revealing “how radically book sales and marketing have been changed by TikTok.”
Jane Austen fans are lobbying to save the Dolphin Hotel in Southampton, England, where the beloved novelist celebrated her eighteenth birthday, reports the Guardian. The Southhampton city council is considering a redevelopment plan for the hotel, parts of which date to the sixteenth century.
Indie bookshops are popping up nationwide, reports the Associated Press. The American Booksellers Association has roughly doubled its membership since 2016, with more than two hundred new members joining the organization in 2023 and nearly two hundred new bookstores set to open in the next two years. “Recent members include everyone from the romance-oriented That’s What She Read in Mount Ayr, Iowa; to Seven Stories in Shawnee, Kansas, managed by 15-year-old Halley Vincent; to more than 20 Black-owned shops.”
In the New York Times James Kirchick writes about how activism against the war in Gaza has put Jewish Americans in publishing in a difficult situation. “Over the past several months, a litmus test has emerged across wide swaths of the literary world effectively excluding Jews from full participation unless they denounce Israel. ... Censorship, thought policing and bullying are antithetical to the spirit of literature, which is best understood as an intimate conversation between the author and individual readers.”
Since MIT Press shifted to an open-access publishing model in 2021, “changing the entire business model behind producing and distributing” its books, it has seen more engagement with its titles from a broader audience. Inside Higher Ed unpacks the business strategy and what it might mean for other university and small presses.
In the Atlantic Lily Meyer considers the life of Judith Jones, whose storied career at Knopf—where she rescued The Diary of Anne Frank from the slush pile and edited acclaimed literary writers like John Updike and cookbook author Julia Child—is the subject of a new book by Sara B. Franklin, The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America, published today by Atria Books.
NPR digs into the environmental impact of reading and whether print or digital books are better for the planet. “It’s not cut and dried,” Mike Berners-Lee, a British sustainability professor, tells reporter Chloe Veltman.
Maggie Nelson’s cult favorite poetry collection, Bluets, has been adapted for a stage production. The New York Times reviews the show at the Royal Court Theater in London, where it is running through June 29.
The Paris Review offers a peek inside Alice Munro’s notebooks.
On Literary Hub James Folta weighs in on a recent report about AI’s transformation of the media landscape and its implications for workers in book publishing. “This entire report makes clear to me that the powers that be see AI as a way to make more money by squeezing down their cost of labor.”
The Silent Book Club movement is going strong, with more than one thousand chapters in fifty countries gathering for quiet reading sessions, according to a recent announcement. Read about the rise of the Silent Book Club in Poets & Writers Magazine.
Book Riot offers an overview of states demonizing the American Library Association because of its stance against book banning and how they are thwarting local libraries and their staff from associating with the organization.
Publishers Weekly reports from the U.S. Book Show, an annual publishing conference hosted by the magazine and the Association of American Literary Agents, which took place Wednesday in New York City.
Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is one of the most famous narratives of fugitivity from slavery in the United States. Now her brother’s story of escape has been published for the first time in nearly one hundred seventy years by the University of Chicago Press, reports the New York Times: John Swanson Jacobs’s The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery; A Rediscovered Narrative, With a Full Biography.
The Associated Press offers a peek inside Madrid’s Caja de las Letras, or Letter Box, a project of the Cervantes Institute that stores Spanish literary and other cultural artifacts in the old safe of the Banco Español del Río de la Plata, which is open to the public.
The New Yorker reports on how Minneapolis Central Library has welcomed homeless patrons at a time when homelessness has been on the rise nationwide. “The police regularly clear the city’s streets of encampments, but officers don’t run unhoused people out of Central. As long as they follow the rules, any patron—and everyone at the library is called a patron—can stay all day, every day.”
The New York Times interviews Paul Yamazaki, the chief buyer for City Lights Booksellers in San Francisco. “At City Lights we see a growing enthusiasm, particularly among younger readers (from my perspective, anyone under 40), for printed matter.”
PBS offers a report from inside “Seattle’s burgeoning community of literary translators.”
Interview magazine features a conversation between author Chelsea Hodson and Ashleah Gonzales, multimedia star Kendall Jenner’s modeling agent. Gonzales this week published a book of poetry, Fake Piñata and Other Poems, with Hodson’s indie press, Rose Books. Gonzales is also apparently responsible for Jenner’s emergence as a “literary it-girl,” curating the Kardashian kin member’s library: “In the summer of 2019, every other paparazzi shot of the supermodel featured a hot alt-lit title as accessory.”
In the New Yorker Anthony Lane considers Blinkest, an app that compresses full-length books into “micro-synopses” for those who value “knowledge management” over the pleasures of leisurely reading.
A tale in Stephen King’s latest story collection—You Like It Darker, published this week—took the horror master forty-five years to complete. “What happens with me is I will write stories and they don’t always get done," King tells NPR. “And the ones that don’t get done go in a drawer and I forget all about them.”
The New Yorker considers a new podcast series called Not All Propaganda Is Art, which unpacks how the “CIA turned writers into operatives” during the Cold War.
PEN America has published remarks by its president, author Jenny Finney Boylan, at the free speech organization’s annual fundraising gala last week. Boylan addressed the ongoing controversy over PEN America’s response to the war in Gaza, which led PEN to cancel its annual literary festival and awards ceremony. “To our critics I want to say that we hear you, and we want to move forward with you, together. We are determined to amplify the voices of all writers at risk—from Israel to Ukraine, from Palestine to Russia, from Florida to Texas.” The gala reportedly raised more than $2 million.
A report on AI’s “transformative effects” on media finds that AI has already affected or will likely affect three aspects of the book industry: content creation, editing, and sales and marketing, reports Publishers Weekly. “Publishers including Hachette, HarperCollins, and Macmillan Education are partnering with such technology providers as OpenAI, Jasper, and Google.”
An open letter with more than one hundred signatories is calling for the resignation of the Board of Trustees of Kundiman, a nonprofit that supports the Asian American literary community, over the organization’s response to the war in Gaza, reports Literary Hub. “The letter goes on to detail a number of grievances and demands, all dating back to an October 11th incident in which the Kundiman co-founders and board ‘took to Kundiman’s social media accounts to delete a staff-posted statement of solidarity with Palestinians and replaced it with one that conflated Jewish lives with Israel while also erasing Gazans entirely.’”
The Donnelly Public Library in Idaho will prohibit unchaperoned readers under the age of eighteen in order to comply with a “library porn” law. The legislation requires public and private libraries to “relocate a book to an adults-only section within 60 days of receiving a written complaint,” writes Boise State Public Radio. “Our size prohibits us from separating our ‘grown up’ books to be out of the accessible range of children,” the library’s management reportedly wrote in a statement.
The New York Times has a report on the “shake up” at Knopf Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House, that led to the departure of Alfred A. Knopf publisher Reagan Arthur and Pantheon and Schocken publisher Lisa Lucas, which “likely came as a surprise to many in the company.”
An ongoing rivalry between hip-hop artists Drake and Kendrick Lamar got Erica Ezeifedi thinking about feuds in the book world. On Book Riot Ezeifedi recalls “literary beefs” between Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison and journalist Bill Moyers, Salman Rushdie and John Updike, and others.
Nonprofit Quarterly considers how the LGBTQ community and its allies are working to support the right to read as conservative activists across the country are increasing efforts to ban books with queer themes from school and public libraries. “Many LGBTQ+ advocates and groups believe that these book bans are attempts to remove the very identities of LGBTQ+ people—but they are refusing to let that happen.”
Washington Post book critic Michael Dirda offers tips for deepening your reading experience.
In an announced “restructure” for Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group (KDPG), Alfred A. Knopf publisher Reagan Arthur and Pantheon Schocken publisher Lisa Lucas will both leave their positions, reports Publishers Weekly. “Jordan Pavlin has been promoted to executive VP and publisher at Knopf, in addition to her role as editor-in-chief, newly reporting to [KDPG president and publisher Maya] Mavjee and managing both the Knopf and Schocken editorial departments. Pantheon editorial now reports to VP and editorial director Denise Oswald, who will newly report to Doubleday EVP, publisher, and editor-in-chief Bill Thomas. The search for a new editorial director at Shocken continues, and the role’s eventual occupant will report to Pavlin.”
Lucas Wittmann is the new executive director of the Unterberg Poetry Center at 92NY, writes Publishers Weekly. The announcement follows months of controversy for the Center after it cancelled an October 2023 event featuring Viet Thanh Nguyen because of the author’s public criticism of Israel in the wake of the Hamas attack on the country; the Center then put an indefinite hold on literary events. Wittmann will be coming from Time magazine, where he was the editorial director of the ideas and opinion sections; he previously worked at W. W. Norton, Regan Arts, and as literary editor of the Daily Beast and Newsweek.
Washington Square Press, an imprint of Atria Books—which is a division of Simon & Schuster—is getting a rebrand. Next spring it will begin publishing hardcover literary fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, reports Publishers Weekly. “The reimagined imprint, which for many years has been the home of many of Atria’s trade paperback reprints, will be helmed by Atria v-p and editorial director Lindsay Sagnette.”
The Los Angeles Times reports on The Libros Lincoln Heights, an L.A. bookstore opened late last year by an electrical engineer. “In the months since opening, the Libros has become a neighborhood hub, spotlighting books and authors that can’t always be found on the shelves of other bookstores. Collections of self-published poetry and family histories of Lincoln Heights sit alongside multi-award-winning books by Viet Thanh Nguyen and Kelly Lytle Hernández (also L.A. residents).”
British Queen Camilla is a literary “podcast queen,” writes the Daily Mail. The second season of the Queen’s Reading Room, which is hosted by Vicki Perrin with prerecorded segments by the Queen, is set to feature authors Neil Gaiman, Peter James, and Kate Mosse, among other writers.
The New York Times considers the “literary empire” actress Reese Witherspoon has built with Reese’s Book Club. “In 2023, print sales for the club’s selections outpaced those of Oprah’s Book Club and Read With Jenna, according to Circana Bookscan, adding up to 2.3 million copies sold.”
Elastic, a new print magazine of “psychedelic art and literature,” is set to launch next spring, reports Literary Hub. Led by founding editor in chief Hillary Brenhouse, the former editorial director of Bold Type Books and editor in chief of Guernica, Elastic will be “supported in part by grants from UC Berkeley and Harvard as part of their Psychedelics in Society and Culture initiative.”
On the blog of publisher Verso, Miriam Gordis explores what she describes as a labor crisis in book publishing.
Amid criticism of PEN America’s response to the war in Gaza, which led the free speech organization to cancel its 2024 literary festival and awards ceremony, PEN’s annual fundraising gala pulled in more than $2 million last night, reports the Associated Press. But the event was not without controversy: “[A]round 20 protestors stood in front of the museum, calling out names of Palestinian civilians killed and chanting ‘Shame!’ as gala attendees arrived.”
A book containing marginalia by Paradise Lost author John Milton has been discovered in the Burton Barr Central Library in Phoenix, reports the BBC. The handwritten notes were found in a copy of Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles (1587), which is now “one of just three known books to preserve Milton’s handwritten reading notes, and one of just nine books to have survived from his library.”
The Japan Times explores an effort by Iraqi Kurds to digitize “rare and vulnerable” books integral to Kurdish identity; considered the largest stateless ethnic group in the world, the Kurdish people number more than 25 million and live primarily in Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey.
The Hong Kong Free Press considers a new anthology that collects poetry by migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong.
The New York Times offers its take on PEN America—which holds its annual fundraising gala tonight—amid criticism of its response to the war in Gaza that has left the free speech organization in crisis. “What does it mean to defend writers amid a polarizing war? When should a group that promotes free expression for all take sides? And at a time of extreme humanitarian crisis that some see as genocide, is a commitment to big-tent dialogue a necessity, or a dodge?”
The company behind ChatGPT, OpenAI, has an “old-fashioned homage to the written word” in its San Francisco office: a library of physical books. The New York Times offers a peek at its shelves.
The Pittsburgh City Paper considers the Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange, “a staple of the local literary scene, touted as the city’s oldest continuously running poetry workshop,” which has been meeting for more than fifty years.
The latest article in a series by Publishers Weekly about AI start-up companies in the book industry considers “Shimmr, an automated book advertising service, and Likewise’s Pix, a chatbot and app that offers book recommendations.”
In the Atlantic author Lorrie Moore reflects on the legacy of Alice Munro, the short fiction writer and Nobel laureate whose death at age ninety-two was announced yesterday.
Fiction writer Alice Munro, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013, has died at age ninety-two.
Some former clients of Small Press Distribution, which announced its closure in March, have inked new distribution deals with Independent Publishers Group (IPG) and Itasca Books, reports Publishers Weekly. Black Lawrence Press, Blackwater Press, Bull City Press, Chax Press, Grid Books, Marsh Hawk Press, Ronsdale Press (excluding Canada), Roof Books, and Sinister Wisdom have signed with IPG. Epiphany Magazine, IF SF Publishing, River River Books, Rescue Press, and Threadsuns Press have signed with Itasca.
Today.com interviews Sarah Jessica Parker about SJP Lit, the book imprint launched by the Sex and the City actress with Zando in 2022, and Alina Grabowski, whose debut novel, Women and Children First, was released by SJP Lit last week. “What I’m looking for is a singular voice, someone who feels confident enough to be themselves as a writer, to not feel that there are reference points that they need to draw on in order to feel safe, or to be a commercial success,” says Parker.
Smithsonian Magazine looks at the history of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., which will reopen next month after a major renovation.
Looking ahead to summer, CNN investigates the origin story of the “beach read,” which it traces to the nineteenth century “summer read” marketed to “rich men, who could afford to engage in leisure travel and unwind with poetry and literature.”
In honor of Little Free Library week—which began May 12 and runs through May 18—ThriftBooks is partnering with Little Free Library, the nonprofit in Saint Paul that is behind the national effort to offer free books through small collections individuals and organizations store on front lawns or in other locations. The company will donate more than 10,000 books to Little Free Library as well as money to help create new Little Free Libraries nationwide, “including many new Impact Libraries, which focus on communities where books are scarce and needed the most.”
Is LGBTQ literature experiencing a “renaissance”? Novelists Christina Cooke and Marissa Higgins hash it out on Literary Hub.
The Guardian rounds up its picks for the best of the literary internet, from New Yorker critic Merve Emre’s podcast to bots on X (formerly Twitter) channeling Anaïs Nin and Virginia Woolf.
Publishers Weekly offers a status update on the nation’s most consequential lawsuits seeking to protect the freedom to read amid an unprecedented rise in efforts to ban books from school and public libraries.
