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The Roundup: September 17, 2021

Book awards season is upon us starting with the announcement from the Poetry Foundation that Patricia Smith is the winner of the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement; Pearson Education sues a California-based study site where students can pay $14.95 a month to get answers from more than 9,000 textbooks. HarperCollins reveals its new organizational structure since purchasing HMH Trade; essayist Margaret Renkl offers us a lesson on finding things to write about; and more.

How HarperCollins Will Integrate HMH Trade
Publishers Weekly
Four months after acquiring Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s trade division, HarperCollins shares details about how the publishing house has restructured its imprints and divisions. It also said that layoffs occurred but refused to say how many.

Pearson Sues Chegg For Copyright Infringement In Selling Textbook Answers
Financial Times
Pearson Education filed a lawsuit yesterday against Chegg, claiming copyright infringement. The suit alleges that the website Chegg Study sells answers to end-of-chapter questions from 9,000 textbooks, including Pearson’s, “using precisely the same unit, chapter, and topic orders and naming conventions for the questions employed in the textbooks.”

Finding Ideas Everywhere
LitHub
Essayist and New York Times columnist Margaret Renkl on finding subjects to write about. The more you write, the more you write. Writing is something like muscle memory, and it’s something like prayer — the more you do it, the easier it is to do. Writing begets writing.

Patricia Smith Wins the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement
LitHub
The Poetry Foundation this week presented Patricia Smith with the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement. Smith is widely celebrated for her collections like Blood Dazzler which was a National Book Award finalist and Incendiary Art, which was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize.

Three Americans Make the Shortlist for the 2021 Booker Prize
The New York Times
U.S. authors Patricia Lockwood, Richard Powers, and Maggie Shipstead are among the six novelists shortlisted this year for the Booker Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious literary awards. The other nominees are Nadifa Mohamed, Damon Galgut and Anuk Arudpragasam. Though the Booker Prize has historically been for UK authors, only Mohamed is British and she was born in Somaliland.

University Presses Review the ‘Books for Understanding’ Prompted by 9/11
Publishing Perspectives
In honor of the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Association of University Presses has pulled together a list of 671 titles from 65 nonprofit scholarly presses related to the events of 9/11 and terrorism in America.