The Asian American Literature Festival will return this September without the involvement of the Smithsonian Institution, which last year canceled it with little warning. “And instead of only being in Washington, D.C., the in-person and virtual events will be spread out nationwide,” reports ABC News.

Dozens of authors who withdrew from PEN America’s World Voices Festival in protest of the free speech organization’s response to the war in Gaza will be reading at an event called Freedom to Write for Palestine in New York City on Tuesday. The event will also raise funds for We Are Not Numbers, “a youth-led Palestinian nonprofit project in Gaza that provides the world with direct access to Palestinian narratives.”

On JSTOR Daily Matthew Wills explores the origin of the penguin in the logo of Penguin Random House, previously Penguin Books, which launched in 1935.

Copper Canyon Press today announced that Ryo Yamaguchi is its new publisher. Yamaguchi was previously the publicist of Copper Canyon, an independent poetry press based in Port Townsend, Washington. Michael Wiegers will assume the role of the press’s artistic director in addition to his current position as executive editor, which he will continue.

The detention and imprisonment of writers reached a five-year peak last year, with at least 339 writers jailed worldwide, according to PEN America’s 2023 Freedom to Write Index. “War and conflict had a significant impact on writers in 2023, as the crackdown on dissent in both Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) and in Russia resulted in substantial increases in the number of jailed writers, placing both countries in the top 10 for the first time,” according to the report.

Bianca Stone has been named the new poet laureate of Vermont.

The Denver Post reports that this year’s Readers Take Denver, an annual festival for fans of romance literature held earlier this month, is being denounced by attendees as “disorganized and chaotic,” on par with the 2017 Fyre Festival that led to prison time for its organizer, Billy McFarland. Next year’s festival has been canceled as a result.

ABC News reports on how a recent wave of book-banning efforts has specifically targeted the Asian American community.

Publishers Weekly offers a dispatch from the Independent Book Publishers Association’s Publishing University event held in Denver last week, including ideas from a “roundtable [that] addressed alternatives—or creative tweaks—to traditional publishing models.”  

In light of the current unprecedented wave of book-banning efforts in the United States, the New York Times looks back at efforts that began fifty years ago to ban Robert Cormier’s 1974 novel, The Chocolate War.

The New York Times investigates the theft of 170 rare books by Russian classic authors worth more than $2.6 million from European libraries. “How Russian rare books came to be at the center of a possible multinational criminal conspiracy is a story of money and geopolitics as much as of crafty forgers and lackluster library security.”

A group of academics, including many poets and writers, have announced “an academic and cultural boycott of Columbia University and Barnard College” due to the university and college’s response to protestors demanding a divestment “from Israel’s US-backed genocide in Gaza and the West Bank.” The list of signatories includes authors Jamel Brinkley, Alexandra Kleeman, Kiese Laymon, Claire Luchette, Solmaz Sharif, and others. The letter notes that “80% of educational facilities in Gaza have been partially or wholly destroyed, including every university, the Gaza Municipal Archive and hundreds of libraries, bookstores, and publishing houses.” 

Liese Mayer has been appointed as executive editor of Little, Brown. “Mayer was most recently editorial director of fiction at Bloomsbury US, where she acquired and edited such titles as Women Talking by Miriam Toews, Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy, Girlhood by Melissa Febos, and Zorrie by Laird Hunt,” writes Publishers Weekly.

Paul Auster, the critically acclaimed novelist and writer in nearly every genre, has died at age seventy-seven.

The New Yorker investigates the “Order of the Third Bird,” which is “an underground international fellowship, made up of artists, authors, booksellers, professors, and avant-gardists who try to understand what attention is, how to channel it, what it can do.”

Maryland has passed a Freedom to Read Act, joining a growing list of states supporting such legislation in response to an unprecedented wave of book-banning efforts. The law, signed by Maryland’s governor late last week, offers “a series of comprehensive protections for school and public library workers, as well as the materials acquired and housed in these institutions,” reports Book Riot.

Publishers Weekly reports on festivities held across the nation on Independent Bookstore Day, which was April 27. “Many stores partnered on organized crawls for book lovers, who received passports and stamps to mark their progress. Some booksellers in areas with large concentrations of stores—such as Chicagoland, which had 45 participating stores—went so far as to commission shuttle buses to more efficiently transport customers to different locations. (One bookseller reported that she took the opportunity to handsell a favorite read to customers during the bus ride.)”

Amid criticism that AI infringes on authors’ copyrights and otherwise poses a threat to the writing trade, some authors are using it to feed their creative process, reports NPR.

The Tampa Bay Times speaks with novelist Lauren Groff about her new bookstore in Florida, The Lynx, which opened on Sunday. “‘We did this because of book bans,’ Groff says. ‘We want to fight back against the chill of authoritarianism that is creeping across Florida.’”

PEN America has canceled its annual World Voices Festival after many writers declined to participate in protest of its response to the war in Gaza. PEN America’s CEO Suzanne Nossel has responded on MSNBC. The Atlantic offers some analysis about the future of the free speech organization after a series of controversies have rocked its operations this year: “Can an organization that sees itself as above politics, that sees itself straightforwardly as a support system for an open society, be allowed to exist anymore?”