Seven leading foundations have come together to launch the Literary Arts Fund to distribute $50 million over a five-year span to support nonprofit literary arts across the United States.
The Literary Arts Fund will award grants to US-based nonprofits and fiscally sponsored literary organizations and publishers that support contemporary writers across poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction genres, as well as hybrid literary forms. The Fund will disburse its grants via an annual open call; this year’s cycle will begin accepting applications on November 10.
The seven participating philanthropic organizations are the Ford Foundation, the Hawthornden Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Poetry Foundation, and an anonymous foundation. The fund was initiated by Mellon as a collaborative effort, with plans to continue fundraising for future years.
Each of the seven foundations made a one-time gift to establish the fund with the Literary Arts Funders Collaborative, a new affinity group that supports charitable foundation leaders in the literary arts field. Additional contributions have also been made by the Houston Endowment, the Jerome Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, and the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Fund of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation.
The fund, which is fiscally sponsored through the National Center for Civic Innovation, will be directed by Jennifer Benka. Over the last 20 years, Benka helmed such organizations as the Academy of American Poets and Poets & Writers, where she created and administered new grants, residencies, fellowships, and programs for writers and nonprofits throughout the country.
“The literary arts give voice to who we are as a people,” Elizabeth Alexander, an acclaimed poet who has been the president of the Mellon Foundation since 2018, said in a statement. “Novelists, poets, and all manner of creative writers shape and drive our collective discourse and capacity for invention and imagination. American philanthropy can play a bigger role in strengthening the financial infrastructure of the literary organizations and nonprofits that serve these literary artists. As we initiate this historic effort, we at Mellon are pleased to join with our co-funders in sustaining and further stewarding the extraordinary legacy and power of the written word in our country.”
While there are a number of nonprofit literary organizations, literature is the least-supported artistic discipline in the country, according to data compiled by Candid, a nonprofit that compiles research on various nonprofits. That study found that only 1.9 percent of the $5 billion in arts grants awarded in 2023 went to the literary arts.
The Literary Arts Fund follows deep cuts to art funding, including those that have affected the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, as well as the gutting of the Institute of the Museum and Library Services, which has been repurposed under President Donald Trump’s administration.
