Romance Class at Dumaguete Literary Festival, the Anthropic settlement hearing, and Federico García Lorca in this week’s edition!
Romance Class at Dumaguete Lit Fest
The Dumaguete Literary Festival 2026 is currently ongoing, and Romance Class is taking part in it! Just last night, they conducted a level five live reading session at the Fermentina Garden Cafe in Dumaguete City. They also conducted “#KiligKraft: Learning to Write a Contemporary Filipino Romance Novel” yesterday at Filinvest Dumaguete. If you’re at the Dumaguete Literary Festival right now, they’re also selling a limited number of #RomanceClass books at the Dumaguete Arts + Design Collective.
Interdisciplinary Book Forum postponed
The Likhaan Institute of Creative Writing has postponed the 19th Interdisciplinary Book Forum and moved it to June 15, 2026, due to “unforeseen circumstances”. In the Facebook post announcing the postponement, the organization said that they are making the “necessary adjustments” and will be providing updates soon.
Anthropic settlement fairness hearing set
Presiding Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín has set the settlement fairness hearing for the class action lawsuit against AI company Anthropic on May 14, 2026.
As reported by Publishers Weekly, the settlement fairness hearing is to ” authors’ objections to the $1.5 billion settlement with the tech firm Anthropic, which pirated books to train its large-language model Claude, that was reached in September 2025. These include the exclusion of foreign/non-US-registered works from the class; the systematic favoring of publishers over authors; the misleading and coercive class notice; inadequate compensation relative to the damage; inadequate representation and class counsel conflicts of interest; and the undercounting of copyright registrations.”
Lost Federico García Lorca verse found on the back of a manuscript
The Guardian reports that an eight-line poem by Spanish poet Federico García Lorca was discovered on the back of a manuscript bought by flamenco singer and Lorca enthusiast Miguel Poveda.
According to The Guardian, the poem is believed to have been written in 1933 while Lorca was working on Diván del Tamarit, a collection of poems paying homage to Arab poets from Granada. The poem will be featured in a book written by Poveda and Lorca expert Pepa Merlo titled Las cosas del otro lado. lo inédito en Federico García Lorca (Things from the Other Side: the Unpublished in Federico García Lorca).
Check out The Guardian for more details.
New survey shows readers prefer print books
Publishers Weekly reports that a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center has shown that American still prefer print books over digital ones.
In a survey that involved 8,046 respondents, 64 percent said they had read part of a print book in the last 12 months. This number is a decrease from the 72 percent of respondents back in 2011. Meanwhile, the percentage of respondents who read an e-book rose to 31 percent from 17 percent, while audiobook usage jumped to 26 percent from 11 percent.
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