“… to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.” — George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”
On the morning after President Donald Trump’s first electoral victory in 2016, engulfed in disorientation and despair, I opened Facebook and found my friends there en masse, posting quotes from some of the great novelists and essayists of the modern age. The words of George Orwell, Rebecca Solnit, James Baldwin, Margaret Atwood, Adrienne Maree Brown, and dozens of others were there to greet me, helping me make sense of what had happened.
Some were hopeful (“It is our right and responsibility to create a new world”), some were practical (“Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced”), some were ominous (“In a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it”). Sam’s “even darkness must pass” speech from “The Lord of the Rings” was everywhere. I probably rolled my eyes the third or fourth time I came to “It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo,” but despite the heavy-handedness, I was grateful for the messages. They got me through that day, and the next one.
Ultimately, these words of wisdom helped propel the early days of resistance to the Trump administration. As Ursula Le Guin said, “Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”
Today, the art of words is in crisis. Federal grant cuts are impacting literary nonprofits from multiple directions. Writers, small publishers and literary nonprofits were hit by grant terminations at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Programs for scholars, libraries, literary festivals and education programs were hit by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant cancellations. And deep cuts at the lesser-known Federal Institute of Museum and Library Sciences (IMLS) are impacting libraries across the nation.
This comes at a time when the literary arts were already suffering. Public and private funding for writing and literature has been at a historic low. The consolidation of the publishing industry into the “Big 5” publishers has narrowed the market for most anything but big-name authors. Today, fewer authors make money, and fewer ideas and literary forms are considered marketable, than ever before.
Meanwhile, university English and humanities departments are in dire straits. In a 2023 New Yorker article, “The End of the English Major,” journalist Nathan Heller wrote, “the crisis, when it came, arrived so quickly that its scale was hard to recognize at first… during the past decade, the study of English and history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third.”
On top of all this, we now have widespread book bans and censorship in education. The macro environment for those who create and support literature, from the writers themselves to publishers, librarians, teachers and advocacy organizations, was already in a state of hypoxia. Federal austerity is the crowning layer scooped atop the dung mountain — to use a term of art — that was already there.
Many funders are simply unaware of the need
What can philanthropy do to help? A lot, actually. Writing and literature programs have relatively few input costs, so there’s a lot of bang for one’s buck when supporting both individual writers and literature and reading programs.
Despite being targeted for cuts, the entire annual budget of the Federal Institute of Museum and Library Sciences is small next to most other government commitments: $300 million. And as my colleague Mike Scutari pointed out in his recent article about the Mellon Foundation’s $15 million emergency lifeline for NEH grantees, that amount is a rounding error compared to Mellon’s endowment.
The problem is, writing as an artform and a public good simply isn’t on funder’s radars — even arts funders. Literature is the least philanthropically funded of the arts disciplines.
Earlier this year, I edited Inside Philanthropy’s white paper on writing and literature funding, a part of our State of American Philanthropy series. It included an analysis of Candid data finding that between 2019 and 2023, funders included in the dataset gave just $535 million to writing and lit programs, as compared to $3.8 billion to the visual arts, $8.9 billion to music, and $6.9 billion to theater.
The brief also included interviews with over a dozen experts in the field. Many of them said that literature is underfunded because of the flawed assumption that it “self-funds” through the publishing industry. But of course, this can be said of any art form — there are avenues of distribution and profit for dance, theater, visual arts, music and so forth.
According to our interviews, the challenge unique to literature is that both the creation (by the writers) and the experience (of the readers) is a largely independent activity that lacks visibility. Funders may believe that not much goes into writing because fewer materials are needed and the process occurs outside the public’s eye. On the experience side, reading a book, going to the library, or even attending a writing workshop is markedly less splashy than attending a theater production, seeing a concert, or going to an art gallery.
Literary institutions are less visible within their communities. This doesn’t make them less important.
Few understand this better than Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Authors Guild, the nation’s oldest membership organization for professional writers. The guild — which itself, Rasenberger says, is “very reliant” on both private and public fundraising, including from the NEA — is at the front lines of advocating on behalf of authors in the face of the federal grant terminations. In May, the guild initiated a class action lawsuit against the NEH and DOGE “for unlawfully terminating millions of dollars in committed grants from funds appropriated by Congress for the programs.”
Rasenberger told me the guild felt it had a “moral obligation” to stand up to the administration. “Altogether, these cuts will cause grave harm to our economy, our leadership in sciences and humanities, as well as our culture,” Rasenberger said. “Reading is so important not for just gathering knowledge about the world, but it also helps you develop analytical thinking, the kind of critical skills that are so important for being able to think, and for just being a citizen.”
Bear in mind that operating budgets are relatively small for literary organizations, including public libraries. These institutions can not only survive, but thrive, with a modest uptick in funding. Yet we’re all standing by, watching them tread water.
Recently, the state library in Mississippi shut down its service through Hoopla, an e-book and audiobook app, in two counties “due to the [federal] funding freeze.” E-book accessibility is the exact type of charitable expenditure that everyday citizens — or small community or family foundations — can feel good about rallying to save. The costs are low, while the topline, in terms of community members regaining access to literature, has potentially huge ripple effects.
Supporting a literate culture is one of the most powerful ways to maintain democracy, fight authoritarianism, increase empathy, and encourage civic participation. We abandon it at our peril. It’s no coincidence that in 2015, the year before U.S. voters put Trump in power, the percentage of adults in the U.S. who had read at least one novel during the past year was 43%, an all-time low.
A recent case study: When philanthropy saved small presses
Just last year, we got an unusually stark demonstration of philanthropy’s value to the literary sector.
It began when Small Press Distribution (SPD), which had been the leading distributor for independent publishers in the U.S. for decades, abruptly shuttered in March of 2024. For independent presses and journals, this was a seismic event. More than 400 publishers across the U.S. were blindsided.
The lead organization in assembling a contingency plan was the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP), a longstanding membership organization. CLMP launched an emergency fund, The Small Press Future Fund, in coordination with the Mellon Foundation, which is also a CLMP funder. The Small Press Future Fund offered one-time, one-year grants of $5,000, $10,000 or $15,000 to publishers to “help stabilize and strengthen their operation” as they recovered from SPD’s closure and found new distributors.
I spoke with Mary Gannon, CLMP’s executive director, about the role Mellon played. Gannon said its support was “critically important” and likely prevented some organizations from folding. “What the funding did was help these presses bridge the crisis,” she said.
Gannon notes that other players, including the Poetry Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Whiting Foundation, and the Hawthornden Foundation provided support amid SPD’s closure. Similar rapid-response efforts emerged during COVID, when emergency funds sprang up to aid writers and literary organizations. One of these, the Literary Arts Emergency Fund, was a collaboration between CLMP, Mellon, the National Book Foundation and the American Academy of Poets. Gannon says the challenges faced during 2020 “drew attention to the need in the literary field.”
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But in general, Gannon says, “there just really aren’t that many funding opportunities for the literary arts.” The lack of relationships with funders and donors is a conspicuous pain point for publishers and nonprofits now that NEA and NEH funding has been terminated. Gannon believes it’s “likely” there will be a few presses that go out of business, “especially given the fact that this is coming off the closure of SPD, which was coming off the pandemic… so we were already, as a field, feeling exhausted and trying to recover.”
The NEA sent its arts grants termination letters in early May, including to CLMP, an NEA grantee. The letter stated, among other things, that the NEA is “updating its grantmaking policy priorities to focus funding on projects that reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the president.” Beyond these cuts, the Trump administration has called for the total elimination of the NEA, the NEH and the IMLS under the 2026 Discretionary Budget Request.
As with the other all-too-recent crises, CLMP sprang into action, sending out a survey to the 51 presses that lost funding, asking about anticipated losses. CLMP’s current estimate is $350,000 in losses across the 51 grantees for the 2025 fiscal year—“this does not take into account other kinds of federal grants and NEA grants these organizations may be receiving,” Gannon says. “This round [of May terminations] was just one segment of the cuts and the impact.”
Covering that need — note, again, the relatively modest numbers here — is the precise type of stopgap support philanthropy is uniquely suited to address. I asked Gannon if she has corresponded with the Mellon Foundation about the NEA cuts. “I know they’re aware of the situation,” she said. “I also know there’s a lot they’re doing right now. Their important fund in response to the cuts to the NEH was one incredible example of their work there.”
Gannon was referring to Mellon’s $15 million in emergency funding to the Federation of State Humanities Councils to address rescinded NEH funding. In IP’s recent coverage of this fund, Mike Scutari expressed concern that too few were following Mellon’s example. He mused that some funders are taking a “wait-and-see” approach as lawsuits play out. Regarding community foundations in particular, Scutari concluded, “one reason institutional foundations haven’t publicly thrown lifelines en masse is because many affected organizations weren’t on their radars to begin with.”
This is especially the case for literary arts organizations, which tend to have limited relationships with institutional philanthropy. Rasenberger said the Authors Guild has “never been very successful in getting foundation support,” despite being a major arts organization providing professional development, legal services, and educational workshops to authors, along with advocacy work to ensure that literature in the U.S. “survives and thrives and remains robust and diverse.”
Aside from the recent class action lawsuit against the NEH and DOGE, the guild has been active in litigation concerning book bans and free speech issues, as well as preserving authors’ rights amid the onslaught of AI.
Rasenberger says the guild has been more successful in raising funds from individual donors and small family foundations. That includes bestselling authors like Suzanne Collins, James Patterson, John Grisham, David Baldacci and former guild president Doug Preston.
Rasenberger says that institutional arts funders may simply be unaware of the impact of cancelled federal literary funding. “I don’t think you can underestimate how important these small publications and literary organizations are to help authors launch their careers,” she said. “When you get published by one of those smaller publications, it helps you get an agent, it helps you get a publisher that will pay more down the road and establish you as a professional author. So I do see the loss as being huge. We need to educate more philanthropists that this is a really important field that needs support.”
All hands on deck: How funders can protect the literary arts
With so little funding for writing and literature in general, nonprofits targeting specific populations — for example, organizations supporting emerging Black writers — fall through the cracks completely. A report by the literary arts organization Cave Canem found that institutional philanthropy gave so little to the Black literary organizations surveyed that “it wasn’t enough to register as its own category.” Public funding, in contrast, was important, comprising 17% of revenue. Cave Canem runs workshops, fellowships, prizes, and hosts readings and other literary events for Black poets. Its NEA funding was revoked in May.
Arts funders must not let reading and writing programs fall further by the wayside. Here are some topline recommendations for funders and fundraisers alike to prevent this:
- Successful authors tend to give to the literary arts, but fundraisers overlook this funding source. Local nonprofits can be more aware of authors with connections to the local community.
- Community foundations represent a massive potential funding source for literary nonprofits, yet most don’t have programs for literary arts funding. This is something that can change.
- Major donors have been pivotal to literary arts philanthropy. MacKenzie Scott, the late Drue Heinz, Agnes Gund, Michael Moritz and Harriet Heyman, and James Patterson are notable examples. Advocates can aim to grow their ranks.
- Everyday individual donors are another source of literary giving. Many book lovers may want to support their local library, community literacy programs, or efforts to fight book bans and censorship — but may be unaware of existing giving pathways.
- National organizations regrant to local nonprofits and libraries, provide writing awards and are involved in national advocacy efforts. These include the American Academy of Poets, PEN America, the American Library Association, and the National Book Foundation. These organizations should be on everyone’s radar.
- Literary nonprofits can work with funders to start giving collaboratives. Recent successes like the Literary Arts Emergency Fund are proof of concept. Cave Canem’s idea for a new Resiliency Fund is an example of a literary nonprofit putting out the call to funders. Who will respond?
With so many sectors struggling right now, it’s easy to understand why funders might see literary organizations as less important than basic needs providers like health clinics, homeless shelters and food banks. But literary arts nonprofits need to keep making the case: The degradation of the literary culture is not a superfluous concern. The impacts are all around us.
As Goethe wrote, “The decline in literature indicates a decline in the nation. The two keep pace in their downward tendency.” Is anyone really surprised that a president who rose to power amid the public’s declining consumption of news and books, who has been described as “allergic to the written word,” would be the one to hasten our literary culture’s death spiral?
Both Gannon and Rasenberger said that writers will keep writing, as they always have, and literary nonprofits will find a way through. “But,” Gannon adds, “it would be great if they got a little help.”
Katherine Don is an author and communications consultant. She runs a boutique book editing company, The Book Don, where several of her talented clients have received both public and private funding in support of their art. Katherine is a frequent Inside Philanthropy contributor.
