On Friday afternoon, writers who applied for the National Endowment for the Arts’ 2026 Creative Writing Fellowships received an email from the NEA saying that the program had been canceled. The annual program had, to date, offered grants of up to $50,000 in fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry to published writers; previous fellows include Melissa Febos, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Donika Kelly, Ling Ma, Jason Mott, Maggie Shipstead, and Morgan Talty.
The email, shared to social media by such authors as Kelly Luce and Carmen Maria Machado, said the NEA has “withdrawn” the “Creative Writing category” due to the agency “updating its grant making policy priorities to focus funding on projects that reflect the nation’s rich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 Administration.” As a result, per the email, the NEA is “cancelling existing funding opportunities that fall outside these priorities.”
The NEA also stated in the email that it “continues to support the Literary Arts through the Grants for Arts Projects (GAP) opportunity,” which offers grants for “organizations that cultivate writers at all stages of their careers, including emerging writers.” The GAP website currently says that the program “strongly encourage[s] applications for arts projects that incorporate one of more agency funding priorities,” namely “celebrat[ing] the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity by honoring the semiquincentennial of the United States of America.”
The move marks the Trump administration’s latest round of cuts to the NEA. In May $1.2 million in grants awarded to 51 independent publishers and literary organizations were canceled, also under the guise of new grant making policies prioritizing projects that “celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence,” “foster AI competency,” and “make America healthy again,” among other stated priorities. The National Endowment for the Humanities similarly terminated 1,400 research grants to scholars and authors in April; last month, the Authors Guild won its class action lawsuit against the NEH and DOGE, with a judge granting a stay on the cancelation of the grants.
“The Trump administration’s cancellation of the NEA’s Creative Writing Fellowship is a devastating blow to literary culture in the United States and an encroachment by the executive branch on Congress’s authority to direct funding,” said the Authors Guild, in a statement. “For fifty years, the fellowship has nurtured countless literary voices who went on to shape American literature, including Alice Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston, Louise Erdrich, and Sandra Cisneros. We are especially dismayed because the Guild fought for years to preserve the NEA and the fellowship in the face of repeated threats of cuts. We urge Congress to step in and stop the Trump administration’s overreach into vital areas of our democracy and civic life.”
Trump has proposed eliminating the NEA, which constitutes about .003% of the federal budget, in fiscal year 2026.
This article has been updated with further information.
