What NEA Cuts Mean To Small Book Publishers

ON FRIDAY, MAY 2, around 10:00 p.m., Michael Holtmann was sitting at home in Sonoma County, planning a relaxing weekend with his kids, when something alarming appeared on his phone: a colleague’s screenshot of an email from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA):

From: <[email protected]>
Subject: Notice of Termination: NEA AWARD

“Within an hour,” Holtmann explained, “I received the same email.”

Holtmann is president of the Center for the Art of Translation (CAT), a San Francisco–based nonprofit that publishes 10 books a year through its imprint, Two Lines Press. Last year, Holtmann and his staff won a $45,000 NEA Literary Arts grant “to support the publication and promotion of international literature” in 2025. In the May 2 email, an anonymous NEA spokesperson wrote that the “award has been terminated” because “funding is being allocated in a new direction in furtherance of the Administration’s agenda.” As the email outlined,

the NEA will now prioritize projects that elevate the Nation’s HBCUs and Hispanic Serving Institutions, celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence, foster AI competency, empower houses of worship to serve communities, assist with disaster recovery, foster skilled trade jobs, make America healthy again, support the military and veterans, support Tribal communities, make the District of Columbia safe and beautiful, and support the economic development of Asian American communities.

Holtmann isn’t alone. “All 51 of this year’s grantees in the Literary Arts category received either termination letters or withdrawal letters,” says Mary Gannon, executive director of the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses. (Termination letters were for active grants; withdrawal letters were for grant offers that hadn’t yet been finalized.) In addition to the CAT, this year’s grantees included publishers like Alice James Books, Archipelago Books, Arte Publico Press, Aunt Lute Books, BOA Editions, Coffee House Press, Copper Canyon Press, Deep Vellum, Dzanc Books, Feminist Press, Four Way Books, Graywolf Press, Hub City Press, Kaya Press, Milkweed Editions, Nightboat Books, Red Hen Press, Restless Books, Sarabande Books, Semiotext(e), Transit Books, Tupelo Press, and Ugly Duckling Presse—as well as publications like AGNI, American Short Fiction, Bennington Review, BOMB Magazine, The Common, Electric Literature, The Kenyon Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Massachusetts Review, n+1, Ninth Letter, One Story, Orion, Oxford American, The Paris Review, Poets & Writers Magazine, Rain Taxi, Words Without Borders, and Zyzzyva.

“Fewer books are going to be published,” one of the grantees told me. “Some literary organizations won’t survive this.”

“Please do not reply to this email,” the messages read. “This email box is not monitored.”

How did we get here?

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The NEA was founded by an act of Congress in 1965 alongside a sister agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The move was part of Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” initiative: “We have the power to shape the civilization that we want,” LBJ told a crowd at the University of Michigan in May 1964. “The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents.”

Yet according to Holtmann, who worked at the NEA as a program manager for eight years during the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, “the NEA has always been threatened.” Then, as now, federal art and humanities funding was unpopular with some conservative members of Congress. “What are the arts?” asked House Rep. Howard Smith of Virginia in the 1960s. He went on, in the patter of a stand-up comedian: “[H]ere is where I display my ignorance. I do not know … I suppose fiddle players would be in the arts and the painting of pictures would be in the arts. It was suggested that poker playing would be an artful occupation. Is this going to subsidize poker players that get in trouble?”

By 1980, members of the incoming Reagan administration believed that the NEA and NEH “endowments ha[d] strayed hopelessly off their intended courses and become mired in social and political causes unsanctioned by the legislation that brought them into being.” They urged that “there is now no alternative but to abolish them altogether.” Still, in 1981, after what The Washington Post called a “star-studded protest [march] down Broadway to Lincoln Center,” Reagan officials “only” cut funding for the endowments by around 10 percent. Similarly, while Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” called for the destruction of the NEA and the NEH a decade later, the idea was never brought before Congress. In 2012, Mitt Romney said he would “eliminate” NEA and NEH subsidies if he was elected president. Donald Trump proposed killing the endowments during his first term as president in 2017, but Congress refused to drop the axe.

This time around, 60 years after their founding, Trump has used Elon Musk’s playbook to destroy both organizations from the inside. On March 12, 2025, Trump fired the chair of the NEH, Shelly Lowe. Within hours, Nate Cavanaugh and Justin Fox—staffers at the newly formed Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE)—contacted the NEH’s IT department, “demanded lists of open NEH grants,” and then “emailed nearly 1,500 NEH grantees from a ‘[email protected]’ email address.”

These emails “notif[ied] the grantees that their awards had been terminated,” according to a lawsuit co-filed earlier this month by the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association, and the Modern Language Association. The complaint further notes that “NEH’s Acting Chairman Michael McDonald actually admitted to staff a day after the grant terminations that ‘they’—DOGE—had written the termination letters and that he was not even aware of the full scope of the terminations.” After sending the emails, Cavanaugh and Fox fired approximately 75 percent of the NEH’s remaining staff.

Details about Fox are hard to come by. For his part, Cavanaugh is a 28-year-old “tech entrepreneur” with zero government, arts, or humanities experience who founded a management software company from his Indiana University Bloomington dorm room when he was 19. According to Kate Knibbs at Wired, Cavanaugh is drawing a $120,500 salary from DOGE. He also currently runs a new business called FlowFi that “matches the best businesses with leading experts”—experts whose headshots appear to be AI-generated.

On April 16, Politico reported that DOGE staffers—later revealed to be Cavanaugh and Fox—had, after destroying the NEH, begun “meeting” with the NEA. A few days before this was reported, a long-serving NEA staff member sent an unusual email to all of the 2025 Literary Arts grantees. “We noticed that you have an open award with funds remaining,” the staffer wrote, before reminding grantees that they could “submit a payment request at any time” to be reimbursed for approved project expenses. (NEA grants aren’t carte-blanche checks; they’re essentially rebates you can redeem once you’ve spent your own funds on a grant-winning project.)

“Never,” one of this year’s literary grantees told me, “in my years of receiving NEA funds has a [staffer] written me to say, ‘by the way, remember that you can request funds!’” Perhaps because of this email, many of the organizations I spoke with had already drawn their full grant funds before receiving termination emails at the start of May. But according to a survey Gannon sent out last Friday, May 9, at least 23 of the 51 literary grantees had not received full payment for their projects before DOGE canceled their grants.

And the cancellations indicate that even organizations who received their funds this year won’t receive any grants for the next three to four years, at the very least—or until Trump’s second term comes to an end. “Given how things are playing out at the moment,” the Los Angeles Review of Books’ own executive director, Irene Yoon, wrote in an email last week addressing the possibility of future applications being funded (to date, LARB has received funding every year it has applied), “we are not optimistic.”

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Together, the canceled literary grants amount to $1,227,500—just 0.0000002 percent of the US government’s 2025 budget. If the federal budget was spread out evenly over 365 days, these grants would represent 0.063 seconds. (By comparison, the government of Iceland contributes around $3,700,000 per year to the Icelandic Literature Center alone, despite a federal budget over 400 times smaller than that of the US.)

For American book publishers and literary magazines—especially the smaller ones—NEA grants are a lifeline. “The NEA was very important for us when we first started,” says Adam Z. Levy, the publisher of Transit Books in San Francisco, which published seven titles last year: “We were like, ‘If we can just make it for the first three years and get NEA funding, it’ll legitimize us in the eyes of other funders.’ The NEA has always been important in that sense—like a letter of recommendation from a well-respected friend.”

“We know it’s not a lot for some organizations, but it’s huge for us,” say Milo Wippermann and Marine Cornuet, editors at Ugly Duckling Presse. Ugly Duckling, which is based in Brooklyn and was awarded a $25,000 grant for 2025, publishes 18 to 20 books each year. Wippermann and Cornuet point out that “$25,000 is one person’s part-time salary, or the production costs for half of our books, or eight months of rent and utilities. We don’t have any reserves.”

At Hub City Press in Spartanburg, South Carolina, executive director Meg Reid says she’ll publish fewer books in 2026. “We did 10 last year, nine this year, and we have eight books for 2026. But the things that most concern me are downstream effects. There’s so much that’s funded by the NEA, and I don’t know how my funders’ money is going to be affected.” Elisabeth Jaquette, executive director of Words Without Borders, said that she “think[s] that safer choices will be made for literature and translation.” She explained that the NEA “often supported those weird and wild projects that are less likely to get funding from elsewhere. Not having public support certainly sends a signal about what’s important to the public.”

Carey Salerno, executive director and publisher at Alice James Books, was quick to reassure her staff that the press would get through this period of uncertainty, but she doesn’t have much hope for future grants from this version of the NEA. “Now that they’ve changed their priorities to this ludicrous list of criteria, many of which have nothing to do with the arts in this country—‘empowering houses of worship, fostering AI competency’—it’s not fathomable for us to qualify for support next year.” Amanda Uhle, the publisher and executive director at McSweeney’s (which publishes McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Believer, and Illustoria Magazine, among “an intrepid list of distinctive books of many genres” each year), agrees. “The loss of McSweeney’s NEA funding—and the lost prospect for next year—is devastating, because every source of support for courageous nonprofit literary arts endeavors is precious.”

At the Oxford American, a literary magazine currently based in Conway, Arkansas—and, like LARB, one of the most recent winners of the prestigious Whiting Award—editor in chief Dr. Sara A. Lewis says the impact will be even more significant in the future:

We have to expect that we’ll lose all of our federal and state grant funding in the years to come, and we’ll also be impacted by state-funded advertising, which we anticipate will be guided by the administration’s directives. We hope that folks recognize that people’s careers and livelihoods are in the balance here.

According to their latest tax forms, the largest literary organization among the 2025 NEA grantees had annual “net assets or fund balances” in excess of $10 million, while the smallest reported -$7,000 (yes, that’s a minus sign, not a typo). Most of them ranged somewhere between $100,000 and $1,000,000. “There are people in this group of canceled grants who could fund all of us with their tech money,” one of the grantees told me on the condition of anonymity. “I’m all for solidarity, but we’re not all in the same boat.”

Many of the publishers I spoke with expressed hope that the collective loss of NEA and NEH grants could inspire a new system of financial support between nonprofit literary organizations. “One of the conversations I’m having with my colleagues is, how do we support our peers?” Holtmann says. Yet for that to work, publishers and magazines with deeper pockets would likely have to become funders themselves.

On Monday, May 5, the four NEA staffers who comprised the entire Literary Arts department resigned, effective May 30. “While we don’t know specifically how the work of the agency will change, we know the remaining staff will do their best to support you,” they wrote in a public letter. They did not respond to my requests for comment on this story. My emails to the remaining NEA staff also went unanswered.

On Monday, May 12, the Authors Guild filed a class action lawsuit against the NEH and DOGE. “We’re asking for the grants to be reinstated,” says Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Authors Guild. “We will be successful. Like a lot of what the Trump administration is doing, they don’t actually have the power to cancel NEH grants under the Constitution. These are Congress’s programs.” The same could be said for NEA grants. Still, at the time of writing, no lawsuits have been filed on behalf of the NEA grantees since the May 2 terminations.

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“People in the arts are often the people who speak truth to power,” avows Holtmann. Without the NEH, we wouldn’t have the Library of America, or Ken Burns’s documentary The Civil War (1990), or the Jamestown Rediscovery project. Without the NEA, today’s most treasured literary organizations might not have survived their infancy as far back as the 1960s. Without these endowments, what holes will be torn in the fabric of American culture? “I do think these people buy paintings,” says Reid of the current administration. “But literature comes at you in a different way. It’s a force they can’t control.”

Three weeks ago, the skeletal remains of the NEH announced their plan to build a “National Garden of American Heroes” featuring “life-size statues of 250 great individuals from America’s past.” The government has directed $30 million in funding for the garden to be appropriated from NEH and NEA awards—“up to $200,000 per statue for the design and creation of up to three statues per recipient.” Each sculpture must be based on a historical figure listed in Trump’s Executive Order 13978, a list that includes Buffalo Bill, Johnny Appleseed, and Kobe Bryant, among other “great individuals.” But sculptures, of course, cannot speak.

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Editor’s note: The Los Angeles Review of Books has received funding from NEA grants in the past, including $45,000 last year “to support the LARB Publishing Workshop.” But unlike this wave of terminated grants, LARB applies for the July cycle of Audience and Professional Development literary arts grants. “We currently have an application for our 2025 program still technically under review,” says Yoon. “The impact of not receiving this grant (and the possibility of seeing a related decrease/cessation of funding from state and local agencies) would be extremely significant.”

Correction: This article previously underrepresented the gap in size between the federal budgets of the United States and Iceland, and has since been updated to reflect more accurate calculations.

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Featured image: In November 2024, patrons attend LITLIT, LARB’s annual fair featuring small West Coast literary magazines and presses, many of whom have lost funding through the NEH and NEA. Photo by Melina Psarros.

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