Three Bay Area Nonprofits Win Literary Arts Grants
Three Bay Area nonprofits will receive grants from the newly created Literary Arts Fund as part of a national effort to champion literary culture. Berkeley-based Transit Books and San Francisco-based Small Press Traffic and the Center for the Art of Translation will share $7.7 million with 37 other organization across the country.
The inaugural grant recipients include publishers, residency programs, book festivals and workshop organizers. The fund acknowledges that the literary arts are “the most underfunded artistic discipline in the nation.”
“The grant includes a five-year funding commitment toward general operating expenses for Transit Books,” publishers Adam Z. Levy and Ashley Nelson Levy told KQED via email. “To have financial support to run Transit Books as well as a fixed, multi-year commitment is the best resource we can possibly ask for right now, particularly in a time of federal funding cuts that have affected so many arts organizations.”
The Literary Arts Fund (LAF) was created in October 2025 in response to the Trump administration’s cuts to the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts. Last May, more than a dozen Bay Area arts nonprofits received notices that their NEA grants had been canceled. Though many organizations were eventually able to restore those awards, the funding landscape was thrown into disarray.
The LAF was established by seven philanthropic institutions: the Ford Foundation, the Hawthornden Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Poetry Foundation, and one anonymous foundation.
To Michael Holtmann, president of the Center for the Art of Translation (CAT), the LAF grant represents what he calls “an incredible boost to our mission for years to come.” Since 2000, CAT has been focused on bringing the work of underrepresented global writers to English-language readers. But this grant is particularly well-timed: in 2027, CAT will open its first brick-and-mortar location — complete with an event space and a bookstore — in downtown San Francisco.
“This grant comes at a thrilling moment of momentum for CAT,” Holtmann told KQED Arts. “This extraordinary show of support ensures that global writers and the translators who bring their work into English will continue to inspire readers and challenge our culture.”
Small Press Traffic Director Maxe Crandall says the support from LAF “makes a huge impact on what we can dream for experimental Bay Area poets and artists over the next five years.” The “seedbed” for boundary-pushing poets puts on talks, events and performances and hosts visitors to its print collection reading room, located inside Et al. gallery in the Mission. Since 2022, Small Press Traffic has also run an interdisciplinary publishing platform called The Back Room, which put out a summer issue on June 3.
“We’re inspired by the swift action of the Literary Arts Fund, in their response to grant cuts and the already abysmal funding for the literary arts in the country (1.9% of arts and culture foundation funding),” Crandall told KQED via email.
Only two other California nonprofits received the inaugural LAF grant — the Los Angeles Review of Books and Kaya Press — both of which are based in Los Angeles.
