Winter Institute 2026 in Pittsburgh continued February 25, opening with a quartet of literary heavy hitters on the keynote stage, discussions of bookstore security, and unhappiness fomenting among some booksellers regarding ABA's media policy and decision to not hold an in-person town hall.
The annual breakfast session featured Xochitl Gonzalez, Marlon James, Min Jin Lee, and Colson Whitehead. All four have set their latest books in what for some is distant history and what for others is the not-too-distant past. “2007 is historical fiction, it pains me so much to say,” declared moderator Audrey I-Wei Huang of Belmont Books in Belmont, Mass., who prompted the panel to talk about why they chose their fictional timelines and how they create “books that are radical in fiction.”
“For me, time is a structural element,” Whitehead said. He combed through New York newspapers for early-1980s vocabulary and “a moment that can animate the character Ray Carney,” the striving lead of his heist novel Cool Machine (Doubleday, July). The book caps Whitehead’s Harlem trilogy, so “I was occupied with sticking the landing,” he said. He reflected on how a life “veers between tragedy and absurdity over the course of a day,” and strove to create “a main character who wins some of the time.”
Marlon James delved into 1980s and ’90s gay culture in Jamaica to write The Disappearers (Riverhead, Sept.). “Music kind of saved my life in the ’80s,” James said, adding that writing the novel let him “geek out on” that period and the “cute nerds” he loved. “The Disappearers is an angry book,” James said, yet its account of homophobia and the HIV crisis coexists with Black and queer joy. He believes his work spans diverse readerships: “I don’t believe in genre snobbery,” he said.
Jin Lee’s American Hagwon (Hachette/Cardinal, Sept.) follows an extended Korean family from 1992–2007, with Lee unpacking what she termed the “economic humiliation and trauma” imposed by the Asian financial crisis. She said that context is critical to the present day too: "I think all of us are walking around with economic trauma, because of neoliberalism." To create American Hagwon, she traveled the globe to fact-check recent Korean history and structures of feeling. “I’m so upset right now the way the world is for kids and parents,” and she set out to delineate characters whose quest for status is also a search for wisdom and survival.
Gonzalez, whose Last Night in Brooklyn (Flatiron, Apr.) adapts The Great Gatsby to 2007 Brooklyn, wanted to write a Latinx novel about “being young and alive before we were recorded all the time.” She paired a “juicy neighborhood love story” full of optimistic party people with a snapshot of the months preceding the 2008 Democratic primary and the construction of Barclays Center stadium in the Fort Greene neighborhood. She scoured old copies of the Village Voice and Time Out: New York to recall the atmosphere.
All four authors described their novels as hooks— “how do I get you to stay with me for 16 hours?” Lee asked—as well as deeply researched interventions into specific periods and diverse experiences. “Fiction functions for me as a Trojan horse,” Lee said. “The first line of all my books is a thesis statement.”
Restricting Access
WI2026 is not without controversy: media have been barred this year from several sessions relating to bookseller/customer safety and bookstore security that also were not recorded by ABA, raising questions among booksellers about how such important information may be effectively transmitted to the wider bookselling community. Following a session led by five booksellers from Minneapolis, Chicago, and Portland, Me. on dealing with ICE in one's community that drew about 100 booksellers, Jonathon Welch of Talking Leaves...Books in Buffalo, NY described it as "all about planning, being prepared. I don't understand why they didn't let media in: you're in this with us."
A number of attendees also complained to one another and to PW about the lack of the traditional community forum. Lucy Kogler, the manager of Talking Leaves, is so incensed that she’s passing out buttons that state in capital letters, “Why no town hall.”
After the Tuesday morning keynote conversation between LeVar Burton and Janet Webster Jones, John Evans, the co-owner of El Camino Books in Del Mar, Calif. told PW that booksellers “just heard from the people that were up there on stage, that getting together is a 10,000 year old ritual, for survival and community. Why would you skip an opportunity to have a town hall where people can talk and have their voices be heard? It distances the board from the members.”
Kogler and Evans both told PW that when they complained to the ABA, they were informed that the organization considered a virtual town hall “more democratic," open to all members rather than just those attending an institute. (The ABA has scheduled a virtual community forum for May 28.)
Kogler said that she appreciated that a day was set aside for BIPOC booksellers with Ignite and that there was time scheduled for affinity group meet-ups. "We have to learn from each other, and we can only do that collectively in a physical space. You need to be able to read how people are feeling, and you can only do that if you're physically in a space with someone. It’s critical to share information; by preventing that from happening to me—it’s cowardly. That’s avoiding any kind of confrontation or dissent," Kogler said.
Acknowledging that forums in recent years, particularly at WI2025, had issues, she suggested that the ABA could hire a professional moderator who could establish protocols like time limits for speakers. She, as well as other booksellers and publishers PW spoke to, also criticized the ABA for not giving advance notice that there would be no community forum at WI2026.
In an email to PW, ABA CEO Allison Hill wrote that the ABA "will always have community forums—they're incredibly important—but they won't always look the same in terms of format, timing, or even name since we're always evolving to respond to member feedback and needs. We've heard from some members who missed community forum this year but many more who supported the decision and many who feel the various virtual forums and office hours we offer throughout the year are more equitable and accessible and that they enable more voices to be heard on industry issues."
