Last month the National Endowment for the Arts canceled grants already awarded to hundreds of nonprofits, including a total of $1.2 million promised to 51 independent presses and literary organizations. Many of the grants were meant to partially reimburse nonprofit publishers for projects they’ve already paid for and completed, leaving them with surprise shortfalls. And while most expect to be able to cover the immediate deficits, they worry about what the move augurs for the future of the literary arts.
“If you don’t have that money in the bank, then it’s harder to go out and do the thing that might have a big reward and might have a big failure,” said Will Evans, publisher of Dallas-based Deep Vellum, which lost a $20,000 grant. “I think a lot of that is not going to be seen in real time—those are the young translators, the young writers, the books that you will never hear are lost, because they haven’t gotten the support in the first place.”
CJ Evans, publisher and editor-in-chief of San Francisco–based Two Lines Press, concurred. “For publishers like us, it is a question of stability. It’s a bolster against risk, which means that we can champion books and voices that are riskier in the marketplace.” Two Lines’ parent organization, the Center for the Art of Translation, had a $45,000 grant terminated.
Many publishers said NEA grants confer prestige and significance on their operations that can spur further donations. Daniel Slager, publisher and CEO of Milkweed Editions in Minneapolis, said his press has parlayed NEA support into donations from local foundations and individuals: “We can say, ‘The NEA thinks this is a priority—and so can you.’ ” Milkweed has received NEA funding for the past 20 years; its canceled $50,000 grant was set to underwrite the publication of seven titles. “This year we’ll be fine,” Slager noted. “But five, 10 years from now—I don’t know.”
Several publishers echoed Slager’s sentiment, saying that though their editorial calendars are locked in for the coming year, the lost funding could reduce the size of their operations in the future. Adam Levy, of Berkeley, Calif.–based Transit Books, whose $40,000 NEA grant was terminated, said the press is moving ahead with its publishing plans through 2026, “but the cuts are part of conversations we’re having about the size of our list.”
Similarly, though Hub City Press in Spartanburg, S.C., lost its $25,000 grant to underwrite six of its seven 2025 titles, executive director and publisher Meg Reid said they’re being published regardless, because Hub City has already paid for the production costs; the press just won’t be reimbursed for half of the costs by the NEA, as it expected. It’s a survivable loss, Reid added, stressing that “NEA money cannot be a large part of your overall funding.”
Yet even losing a small amount of income can have a big impact, particularly for small publishers like Brooklyn-based Ugly Duckling Presse. Ugly Duckling editor Marine Cornuet said that, though its NEA grant accounted for less than 10% of its budget, it was “equivalent to one staff member’s part-time yearly salary, or one month of rent and utilities, or a whole season of books,” which for Ugly Duckling amounts to eight titles.
Reid noted that the NEA was one of the few funders available to help shoulder the costs of printing. Indeed, it’s one of the few sources of funding for nonprofit publishers, period.
Open Letter Books, an imprint of Deep Vellum based in Rochester, N.Y., was told by the NEA that its $30,000 grant had been terminated, despite the fact that it had already received the funding. Chad Post, publisher of Open Letter, said literary arts are “maybe the most underfunded art discipline in terms of private funding.” In a post-NEA landscape, he added, publishers will increasingly need to prove that “putting glue and paper together, and paying writers a little bit,” is a worthy philanthropic cause.
The NEA is the only organization to fund the literary arts in every U.S. state, and many of its initiatives—such as NEA Big Read, a partnership with Arts Midwest that funds community-focused reading programs—brought books and book events into underserved, often rural areas. If the Trump administration sees through its plans to kill the agency, it would result in the decimation of arts funding at the state level, too, as the NEA underwrites a large number of state arts councils. State arts councils often provide more direct funding to publishers than the NEA itself, and the recent cuts hit those councils just as hard as individual grantees.
Reid, whose press focuses on Southern authors, noted that federal support is crucial in a country with stark inequality in arts funding by region. “Diversity of place is really good for the literary ecosystem,” she said. “There is a risk to that diversity when you lose national funding, and the presses in the states with less robust literary and funding ecosystems are left behind.”
Now, publishers are staring down an uncertain future with no federal funding and limited support from the states. It’s possible that cities, philanthropic organizations, and crowdfunding campaigns will step in to fill the void; Deep Vellum, for example, receives more money from the city of Dallas than it does from the state of Texas and the federal government combined, softening the blow of its terminated NEA grant, Will Evans explained. But it’s unclear how the nonprofit literary arts ecosystem would adapt to the complete elimination of the NEA. “The chaos and confusion of it,” Evans said, “seems part of the point.”
