The poet, author, educator and public speaker Nikki Giovanni has died at 81.

The Nobel Prize in literature has been awarded to Norwegian author Jon Fosse.

Poet Rita Dove is this year's winner of an honorary National Book Award for “Distinguished Contribution to American Letters,” a lifetime achievement prize previously given to Toni Morrison and Don DeLillo among others.

This week’s new entertainment releases include fresh tracks from Quavo, the arrival on Disney+ of James Gunn’s cornball finale “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.

One of the book world’s most long-awaited publications, Robert Caro's fifth volume on Lyndon Johnson is unlikely to be delayed by the death of editor Robert Gottlieb.

One of the greatest literary editors in modern times, Robert Gottlieb, has died.

Most filmmakers in the Cannes Film Festival’s top-rung competition lineup are well-known directors who have been around for decades.

A new report says books with LGBTQ+ themes remain the most complained about at public schools and libraries around the country.

The honors keep coming in for fiction writer-poet Percival Everett.

This year’s PEN America Literary Gala will be notable for the presence of “Saturday Night Live.”.

A monthslong Toni Morrison tribute at Princeton University will range from music created and performed by Grammy-winning vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant to a spring lecture series to a three-day symposium.

They may be publishing's most famous author-editor pairing.

When poet Amanda Gorman was invited to read a newly developed poem at the U.N. General Assembly, the young sensation took a deep look at how societal issues like hunger and poverty have impacted Earth’s preservation.

“Maus” cartoonist Art Spiegelman will receive an honorary National Book Award this fall, a medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

The U.S. government and publishing titan Penguin Random House have exchanged opening salvos in a federal antitrust trial.

The biggest U.S. book publisher’s plan to buy the fourth-largest for $2.2 billion represents a key test for the Biden administration's antitrust policy.

Oprah Winfrey has chosen 19-year-old Leila Mottley’s “Nightcrawling,” a debut novel about a young Black woman from East Oakland and her battles with poverty, racism and the police, for next book club pick.

Author, playwright and longtime champion of multiculturalism Ishmael Reed is receiving a lifetime achievement award for his contributions to literature.

Accounts of book bannings and attempted book bannings, along with threats against librarians, have soared over the past year.

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ “The Love Songs of W.

Author Zadie Smith is this year’s winner of the PEN/Audible Literary Service Award, an honor previously given to Toni Morrison, Stephen Sondheim and Margaret Atwood among others.

The poet, activist and educator Sonia Sanchez is this year’s winner of the Edward MacDowell Medal, a lifetime achievement honor started in 1960 and previously given to Robert Frost, Toni Morrison and Stephen Sondheim among others.

The wave of book bannings around the country has reached a level not seen for decades.

Just days after the banning of “Maus” by a Tennessee school district made national news, two editions of Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize winning graphic story about the Holocaust have reached the top 20 on Amazon.

Colson Whitehead’s “Harlem Shuffle,” Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ “The Love Songs of W.

To much of the world the late Toni Morrison was a novelist, celebrated for such classics as “Beloved” and “The Bluest Eye.”.

A recent Wyoming school board meeting was yet again packed with opponents of mask mandates when things took an abrupt turn and a parent started reading out sexually explicit passages from a book available in school libraries.

In 2021, few in the publishing industry worried that no one cared about books anymore.

Republicans plan to forcefully oppose race and diversity curricula in public schools as a core piece of their strategy in the 2022 midterm elections.

Republicans have struggled to deal with Donald Trump since the day he announced his candidacy for president.

Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey narrowly won reelection in his reliably blue state while a Republican political newcomer delivered a stunning upset in the Virginia governor’s race.

Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey narrowly won reelection in his reliably blue state while a Republican political newcomer delivered a stunning upset in the Virginia governor’s race, sending a warning to Democrats that their grip on power in Washington may be in peril.

Democrats in Virginia are scrambling to stave off disaster in the state’s closely watched governor’s race.

Former Vice President Mike Pence has hailed activist parents in suburban Washington who are decrying school curriculums as un-American.

Democrat Terry McAuliffe walked into the Virginia governor’s race late last year as the overwhelming frontrunner in a state former President Donald Trump had just lost by 10 percentage points.

President Joe Biden is framing the Virginia governor’s race as a repudiation of his predecessor, tying the Republican candidate to former President Donald Trump.

Democrat Terry McAuliffe and Republican Glenn Youngkin got off to a combative start in the second and final debate in Virginia’s closely watched gubernatorial election.

Philanthropist MacKenzie Scott has funded organizations that received the most money for racial equity in 27 different states following the police killing of George Floyd.

The National Book Foundation announced Friday that Karen Tei Yamashita has been awarded its medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, a $10,000 honor previously given to Toni Morrison, Robert Caro and Isabel Allende among others.

With the surprise twin hiring of two of the country’s most prominent writers on race, Howard University in Washington, D.

Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka will be attending this fall’s PEN America literary gala.

This year's winners of the Anisfield-Wolf awards include novelist James McBride, former U.S. poet laureate Natasha Trethewey and science fiction great Samuel R.

(AP Photo)NEW YORK – One of the country's oldest cultural instititutions, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, is undergoing some of its biggest changes in more than a century. AdHarjo, the first Native American to be appointed U.S. poet laureate, said she looked forward to having an influence on future academy choices. “There are so many incredible Native visual artists,” she told the AP, while also citing such authors as N. Scott Momaday and Leslie Marmon Silko. But the academy will still call itself an academy, while working to make itself more accessible to artists and to the general public. Besides choosing members, the academy also gives dozens of prizes and grants each year, totalling more than $1 million.

The National Women's Hall of Fame was founded in 1969 in Seneca Falls, the site of the first women’s rights convention. She won 18 Grammy awards and, in 1987, became the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She was 75 years old when she became the first Black woman to set foot on the North Pole, and stood on the South Pole five years later. Born during the Civil War, Terrell was a dedicated suffragist whose civil rights activism continued up until her death in 1954 at the age of 90. Terrell was the first Black woman in the United States appointed to the school board of a major city, the District of Columbia.

NEW YORK – With Election Day approaching and the pandemic ongoing, Oprah Winfrey is setting aside her usual book club recommendations and instead citing seven personal favorites, ranging from James Baldwin's landmark essays in “The Fire Next Time” to Mary Oliver's poetry collection “Devotions.”Winfrey is calling her choices “The Books That Help Me Through," works she values for “their ability to comfort, inspire, and enlighten.”"It’s a mix of fiction, poetry, non-fiction and spirituality, books I know and trust and revisit time and again,” she said in a statement Monday. Winfrey had planned a new choice every two months; her previous selection, Isabel Wilkerson's “Caste,” was announced in early August. Winfrey spokesperson Chelsea Hettrick said the seven books announced Monday would serve as “a bridge between selections,” and that no firm timeline had been set for future choices. “This year has brought such unprecedented change overall. We will re-evaluate in the coming weeks the selection plan and timing for the remainder of 2020,” she said.

FILE - In this Oct. 10, 2016 file photo, author and filmmaker Sherman Alexie appears at a celebration of Indigenous Peoples' Day at Seattle's City Hall. Alexie is included in a list of authors who wrote books that were among the 100 most subjected to censorship efforts over the past decade, as compiled by the American Library Association. All wrote books that were among the 100 most subjected to censorship efforts over the past decade, as compiled by the American Library Association. The association does not formally count the number of times books are actually removed from a library shelf or from a school reading list. “There are actually two lines of objections to the Anne Frank diary,” Caldwell-Stone says.

NEW YORK Walter Mosley is receiving an honorary National Book Award, cited for dozens of books which range from science fiction and erotica to the acclaimed mystery series that has followed the life of Los Angeles private detective Ezekiel Easy Rawlins. The National Book Awards are presented by the non-profit National Book Foundation. But like such previous medal winners as Ray Bradbury and Elmore Leonard, he has never been nominated for a National Book Award in a competitive category. Mosley knows well the reason: Crime fiction is usually bypassed when lists for a years best books are considered. In a statement Thursday, National Book Foundation Executive Director Lisa Lucas noted the quantity, and quality, of Mosley's work.

NEW YORK A new literary award with a $50,000 cash prize will honor those best at telling a New York story. Wolfson and Tusk are funding the prize themselves and have committed to at least 10 years. Starting next spring, the award will be presented to a book, fiction or nonfiction, published in a given calendar year that is about New York City or takes place there. Celebrated works of the past that would have fit that category include Robert Caro's The Power Broker, Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities and Toni Morrison's Jazz.Jurors for the Gotham prize include filmmaker Ric Burns, poet Safina Sinclair and former New York City schools chancellor Dennis Walcott. The deadline for submissions for the 2020 prize is Nov. 1.

NEW YORK Colson Whitehead keeps winning awards. Already this year's recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the Orwell Prize for political fiction, Whitehead is now being honored by the Library of Congress. On Monday, it announced that he had won the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. Whitehead, 50, is the youngest winner of the lifetime achievement prize, which the library has previously given to Toni Morrison, Philip Roth and Denis Johnson, among others. He is the first author to win Pulitzers for consecutive works of fiction The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, for which he won in April.

FILE - In this May 22, 2018, file photo, Rosanne Cash attends the 2018 PEN Literary Gala in New York. The singer-songwriter is this year's winner of the Edward MacDowell Medal, presented by the MacDowell artist colony, which announced the prize Sunday, May 17, 2020. The singer-songwriter is this year's winner of the Edward MacDowell Medal, presented by the MacDowell artist colony, which announced the prize Sunday. In a statement issued through MacDowell, Cash said she was profoundly humbled to receive an award that Morrison and others had been given. Cash will be formally honored at the MacDowell colony, based in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

Across the United States, volunteers are reporting a jump in little free libraries as readers look to pass the time. Since 2009, tens of thousands of little free libraries have sprung up in the U.S. and more than 100 countries. In rural areas, where broadband internet is sparse, the little free libraries may be only place to find a Toni Morrison novel. We have definitely seen an increase in use, said John Sweet, who helps oversee a free library in Bend, Oregon. Janelle Will of Akron, Michigan, said her tiny farm village of 300 people doesnt have a public library, but its free library remains busy.

Arthur, 55, currently heads another venerable publisher, Little, Brown and Company, and will begin her new job on Feb. 11. She succeeds longtime Knopf publisher Sonny Mehta, who died in December at age 77 and had mentioned her in recent months as a worthy replacement. Like Mehta, Arthur has a long record of success. She will lead the Knopf, Schocken and Pantheon imprints and will report to Maya Mavjee, who has been named to the newly created position of president and publisher of Knopf Doubleday. Mavjee, who left Penguin Random House at the end of 2018 amid a corporate restructuring, will rejoin her old company on March 2.

Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winning author Toni Morrison (R) shares a laugh with Oprah Winfrey during the annual Carl Sandburg Literary Awards Dinner in 2010, in Chicago. (CNN) - Oprah Winfrey has written a tribute to "Beloved" author Toni Morrison, who has died at 88-years-old. Toni Morrison took the word and turned it into a Song...of Solomon, of Sula, Beloved, Mercy, Paradise Love, and more," Winfrey wrote. Over the years, Morrison appeared on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" multiple times. "It is exhilarating and life-enhancing every time I read and share her work," Winfrey concluded her tribute.

Nobel laureate and author Toni Morrison died Monday night at the age of 88, according to her publisher Knopf. Morrison wrote such admired books like "Beloved," "Song of Solomon," "Sula" and many others, and was the first African American woman to win a Nobel Prize. Ever since the news came out of Morrison's death, many fans have been sharing some of their favorite words that Morrison wrote or said on social media and they're all incredible. From her books to speeches she made accepting prestigious awards, here are a few Morrison quotes to celebrate the life of the famed author:1. Song of Solomon, 1977.

Angela Radulescu via Wikimedia Commons(CNN) - Toni Morrison, author of seminal works of literature on the black experience such as "Beloved," "Song of Solomon" and "Sula" and the first African-American woman to win a Nobel Prize, has died, her publisher Knopf confirmed to CNN. She was 88. Developing storyThe-CNN-Wire & 2019 Cable News Network, Inc., a Time Warner Company. All rights reserved.

Francois Durand / Getty ImagesNEW YORK - Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison has died. Publisher Alfred A. Knopf says Morrison died Monday night at Montefiore Medical Center in New York. She was the first black woman to receive the Nobel literature prize, awarded in 1993. The Swedish academy hailed her use of language and her "visionary force." Her novel "Beloved," in which a mother makes a tragic choice to murder her baby to save the girl from slavery, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988.

Read on for the highest-rated films to catch, based on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes' Tomatometer Score, which reflects the opinions of hundreds of film and television critics. Boasting a Tomatometer Score of 98% and an Audience Score of 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, "Toy Story 4" has been a must-watch since its release on June 21. With a Tomatometer Score of 97% and an Audience Score of 90% on Rotten Tomatoes, this 1975 release has been a favorite of critics. With a Tomatometer Score of 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, "Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am" has garnered plenty of praise since its release on June 21. With a Tomatometer Score of 89% and an Audience Score of 87% on Rotten Tomatoes, "Rocketman" has been garnering attention since its release on May 31.

Read on for the highest-rated films to catch, based on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes' Tomatometer Score, which reflects the opinions of hundreds of film and television critics. Boasting a Tomatometer Score of 98% and an Audience Score of 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, "Toy Story 4" has been a must-watch since its release on June 21. With a Tomatometer Score of 97% and an Audience Score of 90% on Rotten Tomatoes, this 1975 release has been a favorite of critics. With a Tomatometer Score of 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, "Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am" has garnered plenty of praise since its release on June 21. With a Tomatometer Score of 89% and an Audience Score of 87% on Rotten Tomatoes, "Rocketman" has been garnering attention since its release on May 31.