Our Shadows Have Claws edited by Yamile Saied Méndez and Amparo Ortiz

Last but not least, this YA horror anthology of monster scares plucked from Latin American legends and folklore is absolutely stacked. Contributors include Julia Alvarez, Ann Dávila Cardinal, Racquel Marie, Yamile Saied Méndez, Maika Moulite and Maritza Moulite, Claribel A. Ortega, and Lilliam Rivera… and that’s only half the list!

Through tales of vampires, zombies, shape-shifters, and more set across Latin America and the diaspora, this collection explores themes like racism, queerness, gender-based violence, and colorism. These are the stories that kept a lot of us up at night as kids, reimagined by some of the most brilliant YA authors of our time.

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Judge Approves $1.5 Billion Settlement in Anthropic AI Suit

Authors scored an important victory this week as a federal judge in California approved the terms for a $1.5 billion settlement between AI company Anthropic and authors whose books it allegedly pirated to train large language models. The settlement, which will apply to an estimated 465,000 books, will pay authors and publishers $3,000 for each title. Judge William Alsup initially delayed approval of the settlement during a hearing on September 8, expressing concerns about how both sides would handle the complexity of identifying eligible parties and disbursing funds. This settlement is the first of its kind and sets an important precedent in what will continue to be a roller coaster ride as questions about AI and copyright make their way through the courts and into, someday, into legislation.

Win a shiny library cart for your home! Let the good reads roll on its durable build and lockable wheels. Easily roll your current reads, favorite literary journals, or your entire TBR list from room to room.

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What’s the Deal with Dramione?

I always appreciate it when a critic takes a trend, especially one generated by young women, seriously and attempts to understand it on its own merits. Slate‘s Rebecca Onion, a longtime romance and fantasy reader with limited exposure to the Potter-verse, read the Dramione (Draco + Hermione) fanfic-inspired novels that have hit bestseller lists recently, and she emerged with a theory. It’s not the sex or the magic or the satisfaction of the brainy girl finding out that the too-cool guy liked her all along. No, Dramione works because it speaks to the political moment.

I have become convinced that it is the ship that helps people resolve real-life political tensions inside of fantasy. We’ve been inundated over the past decade with reporting and firsthand evidence of the rifts that the resurgence of right-wing trad thought has created between men and women.

Onion quotes YouTube creator Princes Weekes, who describes the Dramione dynamic as a love story between “the scolder in chief and the person who needs scolding the most.” I don’t need to read a single word of any of these books to understand why that’s so appealing.

Bed-Stuy Gets a Black Lesbian Bookstore

After Tiffany Dockery got laid off from Google last year, she made a move that every reader has daydreamed about but few get to experience: she opened a bookstore. Gladys Books & Wine, located in New York’s historically significant Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, is intended to be a gathering space specifically for Black lesbians. Dockery cashed out her 401(k) to build the store, which she hopes will contribute to a renewed sense of community in a neighborhood that has been deeply impacted by displacement and the housing crisis. She also hopes that bringing people together over books can offer an alternative to “chronic online-ness.” As the Trump administration continues its attacks on people of color and the queer community, literary spaces offer important opportunities for connection, support, and activism. May Dockery’s efforts succeed.

Bring on the Bookish Sweatshirts

The coziest months are finally approaching, even if fall is more of an idea than a reality in my neck of the woods right now. You won’t be able to resist these bookish sweatshirts for your seasonal wardrobe.

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Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.

Trump Targets Journalists and Authors in Billion-Dollar Lawsuit

Trump continues his streak of lawsuits against news media companies with a $15 billion defamation lawsuit against New York Times journalists who authored a book and articles focusing on his finances and role in the show, The Apprentice. The book, published by Penguin Random House, and NYT articles published ahead of the last election. We’ve seen major news corporations and other formidable institutions settle out of court. Lawsuits are costly, time-consuming, and the president wields great power but, in my opinion, settling sets a terrible precedent and damages reputations. Law firm Paul, Weiss lost major partners after entering a deal with Trump to remove an executive order against the firm. The optics of a law firm fearing the courtroom is yikes, and you have to wonder if it was worth it. I think not. Katie Fallow, deputy litigation director at Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute, told AP News, “Trump’s new lawsuit appears designed not to vindicate any genuine reputational harm, but to impose crushing legal costs on media organizations and create a chilling effect that will deter future critical coverage of Trump’s conduct and business dealings.” The NYT and PRH so far sound committed to standing by its writers.

The Housemaid Adaptation Has a Trailer

The adaptation of The Housemaid, Freida McFadden’s dark domestic thriller, has a trailer and it is tense. Starring Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried (who kinda look like the same person to me), the book and film follows Millie, the housemaid for the wealthy Winchester family, and Nina, her employer. Millie, desperate for work and to escape her past, can’t afford to leave her job even as she discovers horrifying secrets about the Winchester family. Based on the success of the book, the talent attached, and our collective hunger for domestic thrillers, I’m predicting this movie, out December 19th, will do very well in the box office.

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A New Digital Comics Platform Marrying Webtoon and Disney

Popular digital comics company Webtoon has reached a tentative agreement with Disney to create a new digital platform. The platform will host both Webtoon comics and Disney’s catalog of Marvel, Star Wars, and other comics. According to Publishers Weekly, “the new platform will include a mix of vertical and traditional formats for archived comics, current comic book runs, and original stories.” Web comics have really taken off, so Disney cozying up to a popular, established space for the form makes sense. A final agreement is pending but Disney’s impending 2% equity stake in Webtoon has already sent the company’s stock soaring.

Horrifying New Historical Fiction for Fall

Let’s hear it for crisp mornings and hot beverages. Fall is nigh and if you’re looking for some historical fiction to get you in the Halloween spirit, we’ve got a selection of anticipated new releases out this fall featuring demons, witches, spirit mediums, and haunted houses.

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I usually don’t link to Book Riot things here on TIB in the first couple of spots, but am making an exception today. Our editor Danika Ellis does a weekly look at what books are most popular on Goodreads, and this week she noticed that all 50 of the top books were by white authors. Now, Danika notes that it usually is only very, very white not exclusively white. To say this is dispiriting is an understatement.

I am tempted to make arguments and observations, but I don’t really have anything new to add. For a while it looked liked long-hoped for progress towards a books and reading culture in the U.S. that looks (and sounds) like the U.S. itself was happening. When it comes to awards, things look a lot different than they once did. The line-up of what is getting published does too. But when it comes to the books that are getting the most reader attention, and the Goodreads list is the best proxy for this we have, it looks like nothing has changed. Hell, the most popular books from 1995 on Goodreads have Obama and Kahlo on the list. And now, zero books by people of color. 40% of the U.S. identifies as something other than white, but zero percent here.

This is the main reason I have zero time for “but what about men reading.” Yes, the share of books written by men, at least in fiction, is down from the absurd levels in the last century. Over time, as I linked to this week, this is more cyclical than people seem to understand.

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But even with diversity in books being a signal (the signal?) issue within the industry itself over the last decade, we still find ourselves here.

I have to believe the wider political environment is partially responsible. When colleges are getting sued for DEI initiatives and libraries defunded for collecting for a broader tent, I probably shouldn’t be surprised that the reading choices people make narrow, at least when it comes to race.

The other element at work is the algorithm. And while BookTok gets the headlines, “the algorithm” exists on Facebook and Twitter and Instagam and SEO and all throughout the Internet. And it is an unseeable tectonic plate of herding. Of herding people toward their existing interests, ideas, biases, tastes, and attention. There is variation, but do not mistake that with plurality. This means that there is almost every kind of romantasy you could want, almost any commercial romance or thriller trope on searchable, taggable demand. And the winners win enormous, unprecedented reading share (the idea that one author could have 5-7 of the best-selling books of the year would have been unthinkable before BookTok, and we have seen this happen twice within the last five years).

The algorithm so relentlessly solves for attention maintenance that things that present any kind of friction fall away. Things that seem too different. Things that are hard to immediately recognize as this or that get sidelined.

And so you get a list like this. A list where no single title is really objectionable on its own. I have read a handful of these and like them. But taken together they show us something uncomfortable. And I really have no idea how it gets any better. But I am not done thinking about it.

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Siding with tech companies on a pivotal question for the AI industry, US District Judge William Alsup said Anthropic made “fair use” of books by writers Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson to train its Claude large language model.

Alsup also said, however, that Anthropic’s copying and storage of more than 7 million pirated books in a “central library” infringed the authors’ copyrights and was not fair use. The judge has ordered a trial in December to determine how much Anthropic owes for the infringement.

Anthropic’s use of books without permission to train its artificial intelligence system was legal under US copyright law, a judge ruled. Above, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in May. AP

US copyright law says that willful copyright infringement can justify statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work.

An Anthropic spokesperson said the company was pleased that the court recognized its AI training was “transformative” and “consistent with copyright’s purpose in enabling creativity and fostering scientific progress.”

The writers filed the proposed class action against Anthropic last year, arguing that the company, which is backed by Amazon and Alphabet, used pirated versions of their books without permission or compensation to teach Claude to respond to human prompts.

The proposed class action is one of several lawsuits brought by authors, news outlets and other copyright owners against companies including OpenAI, Microsoft and Meta Platforms over their AI training.

The doctrine of fair use allows the use of copyrighted works without the copyright owner’s permission in some circumstances.

Fair use is a key legal defense for the tech companies, and Alsup’s decision is the first to address it in the context of generative AI.

The authors’ lawsuit alleged Amazon-backed Anthropic used pirated versions of their books without permission or compensation to teach Claude to respond to human prompts. AP

AI companies argue their systems make fair use of copyrighted material to create new, transformative content, and that being forced to pay copyright holders for their work could hamstring the burgeoning AI industry.

Anthropic told the court that it made fair use of the books and that US copyright law “not only allows, but encourages” its AI training because it promotes human creativity. The company said its system copied the books to “study Plaintiffs’ writing, extract uncopyrightable information from it, and use what it learned to create revolutionary technology.”

Copyright owners say that AI companies are unlawfully copying their work to generate competing content that threatens their livelihoods.

Alsup agreed with Anthropic on Monday that its training was “exceedingly transformative.”

Anthropic’s copying and storage of more than 7 million pirated books in a “central library” infringed the authors’ copyrights and was not fair use. The judge has ordered a trial in December to determine how much Anthropic owes for the infringement. AP

“Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different,” Alsup said.

Alsup also said, however, that Anthropic violated the authors’ rights by saving pirated copies of their books as part of a “central library of all the books in the world” that would not necessarily be used for AI training.

Anthropic and other prominent AI companies including OpenAI and Meta Platforms have been accused of downloading pirated digital copies of millions of books to train their systems.

Anthropic had told Alsup in a court filing that the source of its books was irrelevant to fair use.

“This order doubts that any accused infringer could ever meet its burden of explaining why downloading source copies from pirate sites that it could have purchased or otherwise accessed lawfully was itself reasonably necessary to any subsequent fair use,” Alsup said on Monday.

The post Amazon-backed Anthropic wins key ruling in AI copyright lawsuit filed by authors appeared first on Our Story Insight.

April 28, 2025, 2:00pm

A new press will be “focusing initially” on publishing male writers, reported The Bookseller today. Finally, a space for guys to be guys.

The press is called Conduit Books, and will be run by novelist and critic Jude Cook. There’s not a lot of information on their website—they’re still looking for submissions for their first books, apparently—but their “About” page features the definition of “conduit,” kind of like a best man’s speech that opens with “Webster’s Dictionary defines ‘good dude’ as…”

Cook spoke with The Bookseller about the project, and was very careful in his wording about their focus. He stressed that the indie press “doesn’t seek an adversarial stance” but wants to add “a space for male authors to flourish.”

His read on the publishing climate is that the male voice is perceived as “problematic” and is “often overlooked.” Cook concedes that there existed an “occasionally toxic male-dominated literary scene of the ’80s, ’90s and noughties,” but that since then literary fiction by women has dominated, and Conduit’s entry into the market as a champion of men is “only right as a timely corrective.”

It’s hard to quantify the toxicity of previous literary scenes relative to today—J.K. Rowling being the richest author in the world and using that wealth to attack the vulnerable doesn’t give me much hope that we’ve learned much. But there is some data on the gender breakdown of authors. The National Bureau of Economic Research published a study two years ago and found that “the share of published books by female authors and the share of book spending on female-authored books have risen in tandem.” According to Goodreads, Bookstat, and copyright data, NBEC found that female-authored books have risen from around 20% of publications in 1960 to around 50% by 2020.

And analysis of the New York Times best seller data on The Pudding came to about the same conclusion in beautiful charts: authors hitting the best seller list are approaching gender equality for the first time. Their researchers connect the rise of women authors to shifts in genre and the composition of MFA programs, which is interesting.

So the data seems to back up Cook—female authorship is on the rise, especially recently. But to conclude that men therefore need an urgent champion seems naive and near-sighted. To look at this trend or, perhaps more accurately, to feel the vibes and conclude that male authors are in danger is pushing it. Male authors going from 80% to 50% of the market is far from a crisis in need of a “timely corrective.”

I want to imagine that Conduit is acting in good faith, and wanting to publish the books you want to read is the prerogative of any publisher. But to frame their project as a corrective makes this whole thing seem downstream of a particular political agenda or media diet. We’re all smart people here, and I think that Cook has to have a sense of how an announcement of “male books are back!” is going to be read by the wider public. Even with the best of intentions, you have know who is going to be cheer a project like that. And to still be so explicit about this being guys only (just for now, I know), makes me think you’ve got a political agenda or a fetish for being quote-tweeted.

I know it’s hard to feel like something has been taken away from you, or that you can’t do the work you want to do. But part of being creative is being sensitive to the world around you, and to the audiences you’re creating for. And if you’re a publisher who is unable to take a longer view of publishing trends, and unable to guess why the percentage of women authors is rising in the last 15 years, then I don’t trust your taste.

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April 18, 2025, 1:53pm

By now you’ve for sure seen the footage of the latest Blue Origin flight, this one passengered by Katy Perry, Gayle King, Lauren Sánchez, among others. The flight technically crossed the Kármán Line into space, on a rocket courtesy of Jeff Amazon. And despite having its own mission patch, the high-flying ride is getting pretty universally panned as an out-of-touch stunt. What the passengers have been saying about their trip after the fact hasn’t been particularly inspiring either.

It got me wondering who would be worth hearing about space travel from. If you could take a classic author along on a space ride, who would it be? Would they want to go? And would what they wrote about their trip be interesting?

I put together a little four-quadrant chart on who would go, and if they’d be worth reading. If you want to play along at home, here’s a blank grid you can fill out!

(Click for a bigger, zoomable image!)

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February 12, 2025, 1:29pm

If you’ve been following the right wing’s obsessive book-banning over the last few years, you’ve probably heard of Authors Against Book Bans, a coalition of writers, illustrators, and other book people who are working to fight censorship and protect access to literature across the country.

Recently, AABB organized a successful letter-writing campaign, an encouraging win in the fight against book bans. The school board in St. Johns County, Florida, an extremely red part of the country, was considering banning six books: Tower of Dawn by Sarah J Maas, Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult, Normal People by Sally Rooney, Storm and Fury by Jennifer Armentrout, and Strange Truth by Maggie Thrash.

The books had previously been reviewed by a district committee, who recommended that they remain available to borrow. The superintendent of schools agreed, but the school board, which includes some very conservative voices, ignored that lengthy process and decided to hear an appeal to remove the titles.

AABB’s membership rallied, writing hundreds of letters to the school board, who ultimately decided to keep the books on the shelves. It was a win for Florida, readers, and AABB.

I reached out to Maggie Tokuda-Hall, an author and a member of AABB’s national leadership, to talk about the successful campaign.

The first that I heard about this Florida school board attempting a ban was from your call-to-action email. How did AABB initially find out about this pending school board action?

We were called in by the Florida Freedom to Read Project, a really terrific grassroots organization that has really led by example for similar groups all across the country. They’ve been organized for much longer than we have, and we’re proud to count them among our partners.

We have partners all across the country like FFTRP and highly recommend donating to them, and grassroots orgs like them that really do the frontline work of fighting book bans.

What was the response like from your membership when you put out the call?

Immediate and enthusiastic. We asked our Washington State and New York membership lists to write. This school board received hundreds of letters from concerned book creators. It is our hope that all our members will have letters like these ready to go so that we can deploy them more. The opportunity will, unfortunately, only arise more and more under the current regime.

What was the outcome of the writing campaign?

Before AABB and FFTRP got involved it was a foregone conclusion they’d be removed. We’re very proud that our partnership allowed for continued (if unnecessarily limited) access to these books.

How soon after the decision was made did you hear? How did you feel?

I heard as soon as the school board meeting concluded. We at AABB are delighted any time our activism helps the public retain access to literature. That’s exactly what we’re built to fight for, and exactly what we’ll keep on doing.

Did you hear anything from the PTA about the letters? I’m curious what the reaction is like to campaigns like this.

Yes, some book creators received responses. They were both bewildered that they were being contacted by so many authors, and in some cases expressed gratitude for the creator’s perspective. Clearly our combined voices made a difference, and I’m really proud of that.

I think all the creators who participate should be really proud of that, too. As always, collective action is our most powerful tool, and we’re a big and smart community. It was great to see us flex like this.

What’s next for AABB?

The horrors persist but so do we. We have spent the last year building out what we can do.

This was just one initiative of many that are happening all over the country right now. Our Colorado members, Tara Dairman and Courtney Milan, just spoke at a press conference with CO state Senator Lisa Cutter to support a bill that has now successfully moved out of committee, with bipartisan support. Members from Oregon and our international members are writing letters of support to librarians facing really tough circumstances in Tennessee. Our Rhode Island team has become very powerful in a very short period of time, getting involved with state legislation without any directive from national leadership.

We are working all the time to deploy book creators wherever we are needed. We are proud that the systems we’ve been building—purely through volunteer labor—are starting to pan out more visibly.

How can folks who are concerned about book bans get involved?

If they’re a book creator they should join Authors Against Book Bans. If they’re a regular citizen we recommend joining EveryLibrary and United Against Book Bans—both AABB partners—for more calls to action.

Everyone can use the 5calls app to call their state legislatures with a script that AABB wrote, expressing their desire to see their reps protect the freedom to read.

What’s something, big or small, that’s making you feel hopeful these days?

AABB has seen three small successes in the last week. Just ONE week. The new regime has emboldened people to throw all kinds of fascistic nonsense at the wall. But we’re already seeing evidence that pushing back, in whatever corner of the country we live in, in whatever community—is still a potent political power.

Things are grim. I won’t lie about the state of the nation. But in darkness, we find our communities. And our community is deep with the smartest, most educated cohort available: readers. And I truly believe that if we leverage even a fraction of our community’s power to face this moment, we will have significant wins all across the nation. Even in the places, like this school district in Florida—where the Proud Boys presence is so constant that we were unable to send members to their meeting out of safety concerns—we can win. Knowledge is power. And that’s exactly why there are so many people trying to keep the public from accessing it. We don’t have to let them.

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November 27, 2024, 1:13pm

Maxine Hong Kingston, Alexander Chee, Alissa Nutting, David Henry Hwang, Eugene Lim, Rachel Khong, Susan Abulhawa, Susan Bernofsky, Laura van den Berg, R. O. Kwon, Bryan Washington, Danzy Senna, and Ha Jin are among the hundreds of authors who have signed an open letter in support of novelist Lisa Ko.

After privately expressing her support for Aisha Abdel Gawad—an Arab American writer who chose to withdraw from a panel at the Albany Book Festival due to a series of social media posts and published articles written by the panel’s moderator, Elisa Albert, about Israel’s assault on Gaza—Ko, a fellow panelist, was subjected to weeks of harassment as well as a broader smear campaign in the media which resulted in a loss of professional opportunities.

The open letter—which was organized by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen—calls for the New York State Writers Institute (which runs the Albany Book Festival) to issue a full correction of the misinformation they circulated in September 2024 regarding Ko and Gawad:

We are disturbed and offended by the defamation of our colleagues, which has caused deep-seated harassment and loss of professional opportunities for both. Such harassment is rooted in a long history of silencing and mischaracterizing non-white voices in mainstream western media.

It goes on to condemn the “deeply problematic and dangerous” behavior of “literary gatekeepers” The New York Times and The Atlantic, as well and free speech organization PEN America, with regard to this particular case and to their wider coverage of the cultural fallout from Israel’s war on Gaza:

Though serious strides have been made in the last two decades in redressing complex identity politics in the United States, the fallout of the Gaza war among media and cultural institutions has reeked of centuries of racism. For literary gatekeepers such as the New York Times and the Atlantic to disregard fact-checking—fanned in no short form by newspapers Haaretz, The Times of Israel, and The Forward—is deeply problematic and dangerous. Additionally, free speech organization PEN America also joined these neo-McCarthyist erasure and reductionist efforts in a press release, and, along with the New York State Writers Institute, must issue a full correction in order to stop defamatory lies from spreading.

The letter closes with the following call for unity among writers in holding literary world institutions accountable:

Literary festivals, publishers, media outlets, and related organizations rely on the labor of writers to make profits. When we are united, we are powerful in holding them accountable. We stand in solidarity with Ko and Gawad and all writers who have been vilified for opposing war and genocide. To silence these voices is an attack on not only free speech, but on the truth. 

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Here is the open letter in full:

We are writers and community members who stand in solidarity with Lisa Ko in calling for the New York State Writers Institute to issue a full correction of the misinformation they circulated in September 2024 regarding Ko and fellow author Aisha Abdel Gawad. We are disturbed and offended by the defamation of our colleagues, which has caused deep-seated harassment and loss of professional opportunities for both. Such harassment is rooted in a long history of silencing and mischaracterizing non-white voices in mainstream western media.

In September 2024, acclaimed Asian American author Lisa Ko reached out privately to members of the New York State Writers Institute, in solidarity with Arab American author Aisha Abdel Gawad, expressing concern about anti-Palestinian rhetoric by the moderator with whom they were to share a panel. These concerns were then mischaracterized and made public, and both authors were attacked in a smear campaign and accused of being anti-semites.

According to Ko: “I wrote the New York State Writers Institute in support of Aisha Abdel Gawad, expressing concern about a panel moderator’s public rhetoric. In social media posts and published articles, the moderator mocked people who advocate for a ceasefire by calling them ‘terror apologists’ and other names. In response, the assistant director of the Writers Institute emailed the moderator and called these concerns ‘crazy,’ going so far as to fabricate a story that I refused ‘to be on a panel with a Zionist,’ a message that was then made public. This has  resulted in death and rape threats, harassing messages, and the loss of livelihood for both me and Aisha, including Aisha’s dismissal from her writer-in-residence position.

“To set the record straight, I neither refused to be on the panel nor used the word ‘Zionist,’ but this clarification, while necessary, is not the point. The implication is that vitriol directed at those opposing war and genocide is acceptable; objecting to such vitriol is not.”

Solidarity in the wake of the deadliest war to ever be recorded on children is not only essential, it is imperative. The resilience of minoritized and colonized peoples, from Asian to Black, Indigenous, Latino, Muslim, and Arab populations, is built on standing together. From the civil rights movement to recent Hollywood writers’ strikes, history has shown us that gatekeepers only negotiate when workers unite. The sustained campaign of conflating any criticism of Israel, including US-supported military action, as anti-semitic, reduces and dehumanizes the suffering and grief of entire groups and populations.

Ko’s expression of solidarity is an important aspect of the need to build and maintain coalitions among Asian, Black, Indigenous, Latino, Muslim, and Arab populations. This is in itself rooted in the cross-cultural unity necessary to overcome the racial overtures of profiling that have long been present in the US. From the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, to the fetishization of Asian bodies over decades in Western cultural imaginations as either unclean or overtly sexualized, to the perversions of calling all Arabs “terrorists,” the truth remains that media outlets play an oversized role in silencing and ridiculing critical pro-peace voices among non-white populations.

Though serious strides have been made in the last two decades in redressing complex identity politics in the United States, the fallout of the Gaza war among media and cultural institutions has reeked of centuries of racism. For literary gatekeepers such as the New York Times and the Atlantic to disregard fact-checking—fanned in no short form by newspapers Haaretz, The Times of Israel, and The Forward—is deeply problematic and dangerous. Additionally, free speech organization PEN America also joined these neo-McCarthyist erasure and reductionist efforts in a press release, and, along with the New York State Writers Institute, must issue a full correction in order to stop defamatory lies from spreading. The Writers Institute’s inadequate apology that admits that they “fell short of the ideal of celebrating diverse voices and conversations” is woefully insufficient if not met with a fuller correction.

Literary festivals, publishers, media outlets, and related organizations rely on the labor of writers to make profits. When we are united, we are powerful in holding them accountable. We stand in solidarity with Ko and Gawad and all writers who have been vilified for opposing war and genocide. To silence these voices is an attack on not only free speech, but on the truth. 

To add your name to the letter, please use this form.

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