More than 1,600 independent bookstores across the United States celebrated Independent Bookstore Day on Saturday, April 26, Publishers Weekly reports. Many bookstores—including forty in the Twin Cities, fifty-five in Chicagoland, and twenty-five in Brooklyn, New York—collaborated on crawls, providing passports for customers visiting multiple stores and offering discounts for future purchases.

Poets & Writers has announced that Cyrus Cassells is the winner of the 2025 Jackson Poetry Prize, which carries a monetary award of $100,000. The author of eleven books of poetry, Cassells is the nineteenth winner of the annual award, which is given to “an American poet of exceptional talent.” The judges were James Richardson, Patricia Spears Jones, and Chase Twichell.

D. Graham Burnett wonders if the humanities will survive artificial intelligence in a weekend essay for the New Yorker. He underscores the importance of confronting the widespread use of AI in college classrooms and suggests integrating AI into pedagogy. “An assignment in my class asked students to engage one of the new A.I. tools in a conversation about the history of attention,” he writes. “Reading the results, on my living-room couch, turned out to be the most profound experience of my teaching career…. In a basic way, I felt I was watching a new kind of creature being born, and also watching a generation come face to face with that birth: an encounter with something part sibling, part rival, part careless child-god, part mechanomorphic shadow—an alien familiar.” Burnett goes on to challenge the ideal of knowledge production alone: “But to be human is not to have answers. It is to have questions—and to live with them. The machines can’t do that for us. Not now, not ever.”

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.