The whole city buys tickets to feed the one-winged eagle, and the stranger asks why I went to prison, and everyone just wants to see the mistake, to fascinate on a free thing flightless, to squeeze a small fish and feed a big appetite.
Everyone except the little girl in line. She demands to know what fish crime deserves this, this dying, this dying slowly, for a show.
The adults ignore her, but fish hears.
— From “Fish God,” by 2025 Writing Freedom Fellow Ra Avis
Last month brought some welcome news for literary artists impacted by the criminal justice system: Haymarket Books and the Mellon Foundation announced that a new cohort of 20 system-impacted writers have been chosen to receive monetary and professional development support through the two organizations’ partnership in the Writing Freedom Fellowship. The program was launched in 2024 with an initial cohort of fellows, but that was just the beginning. Mellon has decided to extend it to serve 100 system-impacted writers over the next five years.
As the Trump administration aims to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts — the largest arts funder in the U.S. — and the destruction of the U.S. Department of Education is already having a negative impact on incarcerated peoples’ access to all higher education programs, efforts like the Writing Freedom Fellowship are going to take on increasing importance for all artists, particularly for those who have been impacted by the criminal justice system.
The Writing Freedom Fellowship is just one way that Mellon, a top funder of the arts and humanities, is supporting artists from marginalized communities. Mellon and the Ford Foundation have worked together to create Disability Futures, a fellowship for artists, filmmakers and journalists who live with disabilities. Mellon is also behind Letras Boricuas, which launched in 2021 and provides unrestricted grants of $25,000 to support “exemplary emerging and established Puerto Rican writers of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and children’s literature, both in Puerto Rico and from across the diaspora in the United States.” As it has with Writing Freedom, last year, Mellon expanded Letras Boricuas to support an additional 100 fellows over the next five years, for a total commitment of $2.5 million.
Looking beyond Mellon, Galaxy Gives’ Galaxy Leader Fellowship, which is currently accepting nominations for its 2026 cohort, provides $150,000 over two years and other supports to justice-system-impacted artists, including literary artists, who are producing work with “the potential to move the needle on issues that go to the heart of our nation’s overreliance on incarceration.” And outside of a specific criminal justice focus, the behemoth in the world of poetry funding, the Poetry Foundation, has an entire grantmaking program dedicated to BIPOC-led nonprofits and literary organizations that focus significantly or entirely on poetry.
Related Inside Philanthropy Resources:
For Subscribers Only
Why the Writing Freedom Fellowships are important, especially right now
The Writing Freedom fellowships emerged from Mellon President Elizabeth Alexander’s involvement with Agnes Gund’s former Art for Justice Fund, which had an early writers’ fellowship program. Writing Freedom and Letras Boricuas are part of the three “signature initiatives” that make up the foundation’s Presidential Initiatives portfolio.
A Mellon spokesperson told Inside Philanthropy that Writing Freedom doesn’t disclose the amounts of its fellowship awards “out of concern for the privacy of our awardees, particularly those who may be presently incarcerated.”
The fellowships matter because “it’s important to hear from this community that we don’t hear from,” said Mellon Program Director Margaret Morton. “We hear from a lot of very, very good and earnest people who are advocates for criminal justice reform, but we don’t hear from the community that is directly impacted, from those who are incarcerated,” or incarcerated individuals’ children, parents and partners. The justice system is “designed to isolate,” Morton said, “so this kind of writing gives folks the opportunity to really talk about the issues” they face, from incarcerated women experiencing harassment from prison guards to the harsh treatment imprisoned people encounter throughout the system.
But while Writing Freedom awardees are all impacted by the justice system in some way, they don’t have to write about those experiences. “We have writers who have a wide range of themes that they cover in their writing,” said Jyothi Natarajan, program director of the Writing Freedom Fellowship at Haymarket Books. Haymarket, in Chicago, is “a radical, independent, nonprofit book publisher” that, in addition to its publishing work, makes its books available for free to incarcerated people through its “Books Not Bars” program.
Writing Freedom, Natarajan said, focuses on its fellows as “writers first.”
“So often, in a sphere of work that supports artists who are system impacted, society in general and the media oftentimes veer toward overemphasizing someone’s criminal record, or having their convictions define who they are and what their value to society is,” they said. “So this fellowship really exists in a realm of the true value of an artist and what they bring to society.”
What is that value? As a National Endowment for the Arts blog post from 2015 put it, “the arts matter because they help us to understand how we matter.” It’s a sentiment at odds with an administration that seems to believe that only some people, and some art, matters. The arts world can only hope that private funders who share a wider view of the importance of the arts and people alike step up with as much support as they possibly can to fill the gaping funding chasm that the gutting of the NEA is leaving behind.
