Literary and Arts Culture: Recent Events

May 19, 2025

The Drue Heinz Prize for a short story collection or a combination of short stories and novellas (150-300 double-spaced pages total), fee free, is accepting submissions through June 30. Guidelines and portal to submit accessible here.

This summer I’ll be teaching an online short story class, “Write an Electrifying Short Story,” for Stanford Continuing Studies, beginning Monday, June 23, mostly asynchronous, with weekly one-hour meetings at noon PDT (recorded for those unable to attend the live sessions). Registration opens later today. More information is available here.

Earlier this month, dozens of literary presses, journals, and community arts organizations received emails from the NEH informing them the grants they’d recently been awarded had been canceled. These grants are crucial to the day-to-day functioning of many of their recipients, and the application process is rigorous—all applications are painstakingly prepared and subsequently vetted.

These funds help to pay for websites, live events, payments to authors, artists, and staff, and the printing of journal issues and books.

In spite of the small percentage of the federal budget that supports the arts, the new administration in Washington, D.C. has been gutting funding previously earmarked for arts organizations. The Librarian of Congress and the head of the U.S. Copyright office were also fired earlier this month; the Authors Guild is appealing the latter.

To help fill the fiscal gaps created by the revoked grants, please consider making a donation of any size to an affected literary magazine, publisher, community theater, and/or arts organization. You can find the list of the presses, journals, and other organizations that have self-reported NEH grant revocation here.

I’m on the listservs of some of the journals and organizations that have lost their grants and am sharing links below where you can make a donation and/or subscribe.

New England Review: donation; subscription