Literature is in a funding crisis. With the decapitation of government programs like the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, as well as swaths of humanities cuts across educational institutions, the literary arts are in peril. Literature is the least supported artistic discipline in the United States: In 2023, even before the current Trump administration’s cuts, literary arts already received less than 2 percent of the $5 billion in arts and culture grants from private funding sources.
But a glimmer of hope for writers and publishers emerged recently in the form of a philanthropic supergroup: the Literary Arts Fund, a coalition of major charitable organizations that have banded together to support literary nonprofits. In 2023, the Mellon Foundation initiated the Literary Arts Fund with the Ford Foundation, Hawthornden Foundation, Lannan Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Poetry Foundation, and an anonymous foundation; all these organizations share a mission of supporting writers and literary arts nonprofits across the United States. According to Jennifer Benka, executive director of the Literary Arts Fund, the goal of the collaborative is to support “independent literary arts nonprofits with a programmatic and operational track record and that directly serve creative writers in making and sharing their artistic work.” The Literary Arts Fund publicly launched in October 2025 and opened applications for its inaugural grant cycle in November. The fund has promised that it will bestow $50 million in grants over the next five years, including an “open call for innovation project grant applications” in June 2026. “The Literary Arts Fund offers the possibility of a lifeline through this challenging time,” says Matt Weinkam, executive director of Literary Cleveland, a nonprofit organization and creative writing center in Northeast Ohio.
Leaders of literary organizations have largely cheered the announcement of the fund. “I was quite thrilled to see the news of the Literary Arts Fund come through, since I know how hard the people behind the scenes have been working,” says Jennifer Acker, founder and editor in chief of the Common, a nonprofit literary organization based at Amherst College. Acker says that one of the major positives of the fund’s initial grant application was the transparency and democratization of the process. For example, the ability to apply for operational as well as project-based grants means that more organizations will be able to access money for daily expenses, rather than expend even more effort manufacturing a highly detailed and artificial new idea tailor-made for the grant; in other words, the money will help people continue to do the jobs they are already trying to do.
While the Literary Arts Fund offers an extremely welcome infusion into the literary community, some worry about groups that might still fall through the cracks. Individual creative writers cannot apply, nor can organizations primarily supporting literature for young audiences, those whose mission is focused primarily on serving other literary nonprofits, or those supporting youth arts education.
The vast majority of grant-giving entities establish guidelines, and most grant awardees acknowledge that no one organization can be a panacea. Benka did not address the specific requirements directly, instead noting that the fund intends to “focus on areas in which, based on its years of planning and evaluation work, the fund believes it might have the greatest impact.” But some of the guidelines seem to exclude the very institutions that the fund appears to want to support the most. One particularly notable constraint is that the fund, according to its site, will not prioritize “literary arts nonprofits, publishers, initiatives, and projects that are part of and funded by a college or university.”
“This is a mistake,” says Christina Thompson, editor of the Harvard Review. Within the literary landscape, Thompson says, the storied, enduring literary journals attached to educational institutions are the “core of this ecosystem” thanks to their “deep archives, long histories, and relationships with writers.” Moreover, Thompson points out, institutional backing might mean many different things, from an endowed journal with a salaried staff to a closet space and a ream of printer paper. “Relationships with institutions can be everything or almost nothing,” says Thompson, “and the more [institutions] give you, the more they can take away.”
Indeed, literary organizations associated with academia are hardly a protected class. Several of the most venerable university-sponsored literary journals worldwide have recently folded due to lack of institutional assistance, such as the Gettysburg Review, which abruptly lost support from Gettysburg College in 2023, ending its thirty-five-year run; and Meanjin, which ended its eighty-five-year history in 2025 as one of Australia’s premier literary journals when Melbourne University Publishing, a subsidiary of the University of Melbourne, pulled resources. In 2025, Bard College, which had published the highly regarded Conjunctions since 1990, stepped down from this role; though Conjunctions has secured support to continue operating, the future of this forty-five-year-old journal remains unclear. Acker also notes the fund’s limitations, pointing out that the underlying assumption of institutional support for magazines attached to a college or university is shaky at best. “If I had a wish for the Literary Arts Fund,” says Acker, “I would reevaluate the lack of prioritization for organizations associated with institutions. All magazines are worthy of support.”
Despite these concerns, however, literary arts organizations are hopeful that the Literary Arts Fund is a harbinger of change. “In general, this is more than a helpful stopgap,” says Weinkam. “I’m hopeful that it will inspire bigger thinking and creative new ideas about the future of literary arts funding.”
Adrienne Raphel is the author of Our Dark Academia (Rescue Press, 2022), Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures With Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can’t Live Without Them (Penguin Press, 2020), and What Was It For (Rescue Press, 2017). She teaches at Baruch College and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
