Literary Arts

Literary Arts inspire, enrich, educate, and entertain. They remind us that there is beauty and joy in language, that others have insights worth paying attention to, that in our struggles we are not alone. Through our grantmaking to nonprofit publishers, literary arts organizations, and libraries, the National Endowment for the Arts celebrates the literary arts as an essential reflection of our nation's rich diversity of voices. 

Since the agency's beginnings in 1965, the Arts Endowment has awarded more than $140 million in direct grants to literary arts nonprofit organizations.

In addition to grants, the National Endowment for the Arts also engages the public with the literary arts through its initiatives, outlined below. 

Poetry Out Loud

Poetry Out Loud® is a dynamic poetry recitation competition for high school students is a that is designed to improve their public speaking skills, help build confidence, and teach them about literary history. An initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with state and jurisdictional arts agencies and managed by Mid Atlantic Arts, Poetry Out Loud provides free educational materials to teachers and organizers, including an online poem anthology. Since the program began in 2005, more than 4.5 million students and 85,000 teachers from 21,000 schools and organizations across the nation have participated in Poetry Out Loud.

A 2020 research report, Line by Line: Transforming Student Lives and Learning with the Art of Poetry, presents findings from an evaluation of Poetry Out Loud that involves data collection from ten sample schools assessing the program’s impact on poetry appreciation and engagement, social and emotional development, and academic performance. Among the findings:

• Participating POL students were 1.7 times more likely to have 4-year college or graduate school aspirations than nonparticipants, even after researchers controlled for other factors.
• POL students were 1.5 times more likely than non-POL participants to engage in community service and volunteering, even after researchers controlled for other factors.
• POL gave students an opportunity to grapple with their positive and negative feelings toward poetry. Through multiple modes of engagement, students learned a wide variety of ways to connect with poems—and with each other.

NEA Big Read

The National Endowment for the Arts Big Read, a partnership with Arts Midwest, broadens our understanding of our world, our communities, and ourselves through the joy of sharing a good book. The goals of the NEA Big Read are to inspire meaningful conversations, celebrate local creativity, elevate a wide variety of voices and perspectives, and build stronger connections in each community.

The NEA Big Read annually presents a selection of novels, poetry collections, short story collections, memoirs, and/or books of essays that inspire conversation and creative responses. 

Studies show that reading for pleasure reduces stress, heightens empathy, improves students' test scores, slows the onset of dementia, and makes us more active and aware citizens. Book clubs and community reading programs extend these benefits by creating opportunities to explore together the issues that are relevant to our lives. Wrote one NEA Big Read participant, echoing the sentiments of many other participants around the country, "the book taught us how to talk to and trust one another so that we could ultimately approach issues that were difficult and immediate."

Since 2006, the National Endowment for the Arts has funded more than 1,800 NEA Big Read programs, providing more than $25 million to organizations nationwide. In addition, NEA Big Read activities have reached every Congressional district in the country. Over the past 17 years, grantees have leveraged more than $57 million in local funding to support their NEA Big Read programs. More than 6 million Americans have attended an NEA Big Read event, approximately 100,000 volunteers have participated at the local level, and more than 40,000 community organizations have partnered to make NEA Big Read activities possible.

National Book Festival

The National Endowment for the Arts has regularly participated in the National Book Festival held by the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. First on the Library of Congress grounds and then on the National Mall before moving to the Washington Convention Center, the festival brings together hundreds of thousands of book lovers to hear authors read their work, participate in discussions, sign books, and more. It is one of the most prominent literary events in the nation. The Arts Endowment has sponsored a festival stage annually to focus attention on some of the nation’s finest literary writers.

On-demand videos of author talks and panels from previous years of the National Book Festival can be found on the Library of Congress website. 

Literature Fellowships

For almost fifty years, the National Endowment for the Arts awarded Literature Fellowship awards in creative writing. Many recipients went on to receive the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and Fiction. Most received their fellowships before any major national award, usually at least a decade earlier.

The Arts Endowment has awarded more than 3,700 Creative Writing Fellowships, resulting in many of the most acclaimed novels of contemporary literature: Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex, Oscar Hijuelos's The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Alice Walker's The Color Purple, William Kennedy's Ironweed, and Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country.

For more than forty years, the Arts Endowment also awarded grants to literary translators, giving recipients the time and space to create English renditions of the world’s best literature, making them accessible to American audiences. From 1981 to 2026, the Arts Endowment awarded 614 fellowships to 529 translators, with translations representing 91 languages and 128 countries, such as Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, translated by Natasha Wimmer, and Nobel Prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, translated by Jennifer Croft.

Check out the Arts Endowment publication The Art of Empathy: Celebration Literature in Translation containing 19 thought-provoking essays by award-winning translators and publishers on the art of translation and its ability to help us understand other cultures and ways of thought.

The agency continues to support the publication of new and translated writing through Grants for Arts Projects awards to nonprofit publishers. Past recipients include Coffee House Press, Copper Canyon Press, Deep Vellum, Milkweed Editions, and Transit Books.