Your Kid's Art Class is Paying for This Parade

So is your favorite lit mag

There are seventy thousand absolutely horrifying things happening right now, but for the next couple minutes let’s focus on one (because it’s one we can all help with, at least a little bit).

If you are involved in the literary or arts world at all, you know organizations absolutely devastated by the sudden yanking of National Endowment for the Arts funding in the past six weeks. If you’ve ever worked for a small nonprofit, you know what a labor of love it is. And you know that something like $10,000 can make or break the entire organization.

(Hey, by the way, Elon Musk, who pays taxes at a lower rate than your grandmother, makes around $602 million a day. Fun!)

image by Shepard Fairey (2014)

On May 2nd, hundreds of arts organizations began receiving emails notifying them that “the NEA is updating its grant-making policy priorities to focus funding on projects that reflect the nation's rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the President. Consequently, we are terminating awards that fall outside these new priorities.” Many NEA officials resigned in the subsequent days.

There are four main ways places are losing funding: 1) Withdrawal and termination of grants already promised, with money not yet delivered this year; 2) Termination of all future grants; some lucky organizations already received their money before May 2nd, but now know this is the last of it; 3) Given the February announcement that applicants could not operate diversity programs or “promote gender ideology” (meaning acknowledging that gender is not totally binary), many organizations could not or would not apply for new funding for 2026; 4) Less visibly and immediately, there are organizations and individuals relying on state funds that in turn get their money from the NEA.

Many of these organizations have already built projects around planned money, hired staffers using that money, announced fellowships that would use NEA funding, commissioned new work, scheduled a play for production, promised free arts classes for children, assumed they had the budget stay in operation for another critical year. And there are emerging authors and artists and dancers, children in school systems with no arts education, people eking out a living in the arts, who will now lose all the resources they relied on.

I’ve been getting emails from individual literary magazines or organizations hoping for donations to make up for the sudden deficit. On Thursday I asked on social media what places have been affected (because of course this administration is not going to publish a list of all the organizations they’ve screwed over) and someone pointed me to this incredible (and sobering) spreadsheet where organizations are self-reporting on lost funds. As of this writing, there are 564 organizations on the spreadsheet, but we know there are many more. The numbers getting thrown around online suggest that $27,000,000 in arts funding has been cancelled, but this seems to refer only to what’s on the spreadsheet.

Today’s parade, horrifyingly reminiscent of the celebrations Hitler demanded for his own birthday, will conservatively cost $40,000,000 of taxpayer money, and that’s not accounting for any damage to DC streets when dozens of tanks, Strykers, and other military vehicles roll over them.

So let’s look for a second at what’s being lost, just a bit of the arts programming that could have been covered instead of the Birthday Ego Boom-Boom March.

WhyArts in Omaha, Nebraska was counting on $15,000 to support in-school arts residencies teaching dance to children living with and without disabilities. They note that “The funds were never made available to us after we completed the acceptance paperwork even though the award was publicly announced by the NEA in January.”

New Conservatory Theatre Center in San Francisco was counting on $20,000 in support of the world premiere of Simple Mexican Pleasures by Eric Reyes Loo, and that money has vanished.

SkyART in Chicago received none of the $40,000 it needed to provide free arts and mental health programs for young people.

Kearny Street Workshop lost $20,000 “to support an exhibition series and residency program for artists of the Asian Pacific American diaspora,” which is so funny, since projects that “support the economic development of Asian American communities” is one of Trump’s stated “priorities” in funding. It’s almost like he didn’t mean it!

Similarly, you’d think that the $10,000 originally allocated for Living Voices Theater in Seattle to “develop, produce & tour HOME FRONT/WAR FRONT, a pair of multimedia educational theatre shows about women in the World War II aeronautics industry, focused on little-known stories of women pilots and the Black wartime experience” would be riiiight in line with Trump’s priority to “support the military and veterans.” But no! He didn’t mean THOSE people who risked their lives for our country! Let’s not be silly!

Many of the cancellations seem overtly motivated by racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, misogyny… but others—like the $25,000 yanked from Brooklyn’s Center for Performance Research “to support professional development residencies and technical assistance services for New York City's dance and performance communities” are less scrutable. Not that we need to do much scruting. The base motivation—like the motivation of all despots who’ve come first for culture and expression—is to silence and discourage any forms of dissent.

Some of the literary organizations being hit:

I focused above on other arts, and I really hope you’ll read the whole list, but given my likely readership I want to focus here on ten relatively small literary organizations I can personally vouch for that could really use our help. There are, of course, many more. Please post about others in the comments if there are ones you feel passionate about.

• Woodland Pattern, a unique bookstore and event space in Milwaukee that puts on poetry programming: $20,000

• Sarabande Books, a wonderful small press based in Louisville, KY that does important work and has launched the careers of several friends: $25,000

• ALTA (American Literary Translators Association; they’ve been running a vital conference for translators, emerging translators, publishers, and readers for 48 years): $30,000

• American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, VA: $25,000 meant for accessibility for Deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences through American Sign Language interpretation

• The Bennington Review (a journal that ran from 1966 to 1985 and was recently resurrected; it’s edited by some brilliant writers and has only had 13 issues in its current incarnation): $10,000

• One Story and One Teen Story: $10,000 (From one of their published teen authors:"Receiving this recognition from One Teen Story has given me the confidence to nurture this internal, private love that often goes by unexpressed in everyday life.”)

• Milkweed Editions, a wonderful and important small press in Minneapolis: $50,000

• Electric Literature: $12,500 (You can read their statement about the NEA cut here.)

• American Short Fiction (one of the best literary magazines in publication): $20,000

• AGNI Magazine (from which seven featured writers have gone on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature): $25,000

Sending money to any of these places would be a great way to fight back. But so would buying books or journals or theater tickets.

It’s not as if there’s a trail of crumbs straight from the NEA cuts to this parade. But when your priority is to defund the things that give people a voice and to fund the things that scare people into silence, it’s hard not to see them as two sides of one coin.

And let’s be clear that all of these—ALL of the organizations on the list, all the children and emerging artists and audience members and readers and employees and communities affected—could have been funded nearly twice over with the money being wasted on one ridiculous military circle jerk.

Today, more than 1.800 cities in the US will hold “No Kings” events. The demonstration held alongside Boston’s Pride Parade is being called “No Kings but Yaaas Queen!” which is absolutely the energy we need this summer.

I’m in rural Vermont and will be teaching today, so I can’t march—but I’m going to wear a good resistance t-shirt and buy myself some books and journals. Whether or not you’re out in the streets today, I hope you can join me.