Between the Trump administration's cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities and the gutting of the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences, federal funding for nonprofit literary arts programs has been in dire straits. Now, seven deep-pocketed philanthropic foundations are coming together to help fill in the gaps.
The coalition announced on Tuesday the creation of the Literary Arts Fund, which will distribute "at least" $50 million through grants to various nonprofit organizations across the country over the next five years.
The money will go to organizations that award fellowships, host writers' retreats and residencies, host book events, publish translated literature and more. There will be an open call starting on November 10 for grant applications.
Writer, poet and Mellon Foundation president Elizabeth Alexander said the goal was to put together something significant, "not piecemeal. To really say that the literary arts are necessary to our understanding of ourselves as a society."
The Mellon Foundation initiated the fund. Other contributing groups include the Ford Foundation, the Hawthornden Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Poetry Foundation, and an anonymous foundation.
While the influx of cash is coming at a time when small presses, book festivals, writing programs and more are scrambling to fill the hole left by cuts in federal funding, Alexander said planning started well before those cuts happened. "It was something larger, frankly, that we wanted to do," she said. The Literary Arts Fund is something "that we hope will outlast the ups and downs of government funding."
Among artistic fields that rely on nonprofit support, the literary arts tend to receive the least. The Literary Arts Fund conducted a study using data compiled by Candid that found 1.9% of approximately $5 billion in arts grants awarded in 2023 went to literary arts. Candid tracks philanthropic giving. Alexander chalks a bit of that disparity in funding up to perceived overhead — a writer seemingly needs fewer resources than an opera or a dance company. But also, "maybe we just take literature for granted."
"I know that writers will always write. You cannot extinguish that flame," Alexander said. "But at the same time, what I would hate to see is an economy where only the very most commercial would be the ones who were readily available to us. And that's where the nonprofit literary sector needs support."
Jennifer Benka, a veteran of the nonprofit literary arts world, will lead the fund. Benka previously spent 10 years as the president and executive director of the Academy of American Poets.
The MacArthur Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts are among NPR's financial supporters.
Copyright 2025 NPR
