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Literary Arts Fund Grants

 It is fantastic to see the list of inaugural awardees of funding from the Literary Arts Fund, announced today. I want to be clear that I celebrate this initiative, explained on their About page:

The fund, initiated in 2023 by the Mellon Foundation as a collaborative effort with the Ford Foundation, Hawthornden Foundation, Lannan Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Poetry Foundation, and an anonymous foundation in service of the literary arts field’s needs and promise, plans to provide at least $50 million in support of the field and continue fundraising.

I certainly applaud those foundations that stepped up in this time of need. Here here!

As I look at the list, it is interesting to see so many of my favorite indies - Nightboat, Graywolf, Transit, and Hub City, and some great Texas presses like the ever-impressive Deep Vellum. These are presses that do more than just publish great books: they foster community and create important literary partnerships. They are deeply worthy of support of all kinds, including these grants. 

What gets me about this list is that it includes the cities where grantees are based. You see many from the New York City metro area, and as mentioned a few from my own home state of Texas, and a number scattered around the Midwest and then the west coast. What is missing? Boston. Boston nor any nearby cities or towns are on this list. 

I'm not blaming the funders, and in fact don't mean to blame anyone. I just think it is indicative of where independent, non-profit, activist-oriented publishing is right now, in the area. This is a city that hosted some of the leading activist presses in past decades, including the South End Press, Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press (to start), the Boston Women's Health Collective that first published Our Bodies, Ourselves, and more. 

Part of my thinking in starting this blog was how much the gentrification of the city has hurt its independent press community. This can be examined somewhat easily in my own South End, with the aforementioned South End Press as well as New England Free Press, and maybe others. But I think it will take looking at gentrification in a nuanced way, as this list - again - has many Brooklyn/NYC-based presses, which obviously have found a way to do the damn thing. Here I again think of Sarah Schulman arguing in The Gentrification of the Mind that the narrative of gentrification needs to be reconsidered, with eyes on the top rather than the folks marching in and identifying as "pioneers" (though they are not without fault, of course). 

The other factor in the Boston area is the universities, which sometimes, even with good will, take in presses, subsume them as they do lots in neighborhoods in what becomes a move toward gentrification. It's not lost on me that Northeastern, a university that has been accused of gentrifying Roxbury right next to the South End, has been actively building up an archive of papers from local non-profits around the city. Meanwhile, they put their own university press into the University Press of New England consortium in 2004, essentially shuttering the campus office of it (I think the arrangement meant a faculty person sat on UPNE's board and UPNE editors acquired for what became an imprint). They "ceased" publishing in 2015 and now maintain some titles via the library there. 

The university taking something over always risks being a pox-filled blanket, well-meaning but dangerous. In a city full of colleges and universities, including some of the biggest and best in the world, how do non-profit organizations, including indie publishers, interact with them? It's a complicated relationship. Mind you, the founders of the South End Press were almost all Marxist PhDs from UMass Amherst, just down the Mass Pike from the neighborhood, looking to live out their principles in a economically diverse urban area that was fast-becoming less diverse, whether they were contributing to that change or not. 

Congrats to all the worthy awardees, again, and may further generosity continue! Thanks for prompting this further thinking about Boston's indie press scene, or lack thereof. 

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