Seven main foundations have come collectively to launch the Literary Arts Fund to distribute $50 million over a five-year span to assist nonprofit literary arts throughout america.
The Literary Arts Fund will award grants to US-based nonprofits and fiscally sponsored literary organizations and publishers that assist up to date writers throughout poetry, fiction, and artistic nonfiction genres, in addition to hybrid literary kinds. The Fund will disburse its grants through an annual open name; this yr’s cycle will start accepting functions on November 10.
The seven taking part philanthropic organizations are the Ford Basis, the Hawthornden Basis, the Lannan Basis, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Basis, the Mellon Basis, the Poetry Basis, and an nameless basis. The fund was initiated by Mellon as a collaborative effort, with plans to proceed fundraising for future years.
Every of the seven foundations made a one-time present to ascertain the fund with the Literary Arts Funders Collaborative, a brand new affinity group that helps charitable basis leaders within the literary arts subject. Further contributions have additionally been made by the Houston Endowment, the Jerome Basis, the McKnight Basis, and the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Fund of the Sidney E. Frank Basis.
The fund, which is fiscally sponsored via the Nationwide Heart for Civic Innovation, will likely be directed by Jennifer Benka. Over the past 20 years, Benka helmed such organizations because the Academy of American Poets and Poets & Writers, the place she created and administered new grants, residencies, fellowships, and packages for writers and nonprofits all through the nation.
“The literary arts give voice to who we’re as a individuals,” Elizabeth Alexander, an acclaimed poet who has been the president of the Mellon Basis since 2018, mentioned in an announcement. “Novelists, poets, and all method of artistic writers form and drive our collective discourse and capability for invention and creativeness. American philanthropy can play a much bigger position in strengthening the monetary infrastructure of the literary organizations and nonprofits that serve these literary artists. As we provoke this historic effort, we at Mellon are happy to hitch with our co-funders in sustaining and additional stewarding the extraordinary legacy and energy of the written phrase in our nation.”
Whereas there are a selection of nonprofit literary organizations, literature is the least-supported inventive self-discipline within the nation, in keeping with knowledge compiled by Candid, a nonprofit that compiles analysis on numerous nonprofits. That examine discovered that just one.9 % of the $5 billion in arts grants awarded in 2023 went to the literary arts.
The Literary Arts Fund follows deep cuts to artwork funding, together with people who have affected the Nationwide Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, in addition to the gutting of the Institute of the Museum and Library Companies, which has been repurposed beneath President Donald Trump’s administration.
