Related Issue
Winter 2025-2026
First Person
Art Just Became Even More Elitist
The NEA Creative Writing Fellowship program got killed. It was a disappointment for me—and points to a dark future for the arts.
By Marie Myung-Ok Lee '86 / Winter 2025-2026
December 2nd, 2025
In the last days of a New York City heat wave this August, my email pinged, and I, like a bunch of writers, received a shocking notice from a no-reply address:
Dear Marie Myung-Ok Lee: This is in reference to your recent application to the National Endowment for the Arts’ FY 2026 Creative Writing Fellowships. The NEA has cancelled the FY 2026 Creative Writing Fellowships program. The Creative Writing category has been Withdrawn by the Agency and will not be reviewed. We recognize that receiving this news can be disappointing, especially after all the hard work and dedication you put into your application.
The cancelled NEA Creative Writing Fellowships offered up to $50,000 to individual writers, one of the few fellowships of this size. The application required a detailed description of the project, a plan of work within the fellowship year, and a budget—so yes, it seemed especially cruel that the new administration pulled the rug out from under applicants after we sweated out the submission process.
On top of that, the letter noted that “the NEA will now prioritize projects that…foster AI competency.” In other words, the competency to produce writing without human writers.
I had high hopes for my project, American Dream: An Elegy. As a departure from my usual fiction, I proposed a creative nonfiction book-length project exploring my Korean immigrant father’s incarceration and subsequent suicide, and how it illuminates many of our national traumas over immigration and foreign wars. I have been working on this project since 2019, encouraged by winning a number of smaller fellowships, which allow me time and space to work on it apart from my other work as an academic and a freelance writer.
ILLUSTRATION: LENA YOKOYAMA
For working artists, applying for grants and fellowships is part of how we make a living. I’ve used grant money to hire extra caregivers for our disabled son, who lives at home, so I can attend artist residencies, where intense creative work can get done. Fellowships also serve as a measure of whether our work-in-progress is worth funding—and later, publishing. One of the greatest honors a writer can receive is winning an NEA—not just the money but the imprimatur of a strict peer review. Which is why, as a novelist and essayist, I have been applying for them for more than two decades.
One might ask, why should Americans lament the loss of fellowships that go to only 35 people a year? But that’s the wrong question. It’s easy to envision the eventual harm of cancelling research grants for the study of pediatric cancer. But there is also the national culture, the mind of a nation.
Individual artists are drivers of and contributors to culture, and it’s culture that makes us—diverse, heterogenous Americans—a community. No artists, no culture, no community.
The question actually should be, why cut an agency whose budget is so tiny—at its highest (2022) the NEA comprised .003% of the nation’s total budget—yet whose programs reach into every single Congressional district?
I keep thinking about a tweet I saw by journalist Ken Klippenstein: “Asked a German woman why Germany produced so many legendary physicists/mathematicians and her response was basically, ‘have you considered educating people who aren’t rich?’”
Might we also consider funding artists who aren’t rich?
Artists might be born to their art, but how do they survive and sustain themselves in a capitalist economy short of having a wealthy patron or being independently wealthy?
For the non-rich, a creative writing career, especially when you first start out, is always considered a fool’s errand. My immigrant parents, wanting to save me from my own declaration when I was nine that I wanted to be a novelist, started a campaign to dissuade me from even considering it. They didn’t escape the Korean War to come to the U.S. to throw away this newfound stability.
Despite their efforts, I dropped out of the parent-pleasing stability of premed, majored in economics, and toiled at an investment bank to keep me in New York until, bit by bit, my writing career started to gain traction. Government funding made a difference. My last novel, The Evening Hero (2022), took 18 years to research and write.
One pivotal year in the dispiriting middle, I was miraculously sustained when I won a private foundation grant and an NEA-funded state grant.
Individual artists are drivers of and contributors to culture, and it’s culture that makes us—diverse, heterogenous Americans—a community. No artists, no culture, no community.
The public-private combination took the place of my adjunct teaching salary at Brown and also funded the travel for me to attend an artist residency, where artists are housed, fed, and have no obligation to do anything except concentrate on their work among other like-minded artists—not unlike the incubators and startup accelerators that are common to the tech industry.
Art can’t be created on demand. And as I often tell my writing students, art needs room for failure, which often precedes innovation. That’s why the collapse of agencies like the NEA means the independently wealthy (which has its own race and class biases built in) will mainly be the population pursuing their art. It’s not as if it hasn’t been this way for eternity, but at least the NEA allowed for more access.
Yet that might be the problem in the current administration’s eyes—by widening economic access through grants, writers have become much more diverse over the years. Writers supported by NEA fellowships include Alice Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston, Louise Erdrich, Sandra Cisneros and Brown’s own Percival Everett ’82 AM—all people of color who became important shapers of American culture. But racial diversity is what got writers like Ajuan Mance ’88’s book on African American women poets purged from the U.S. Naval Academy Library last spring.
In addition to supporting individual artists, sometimes the NEA directly lifts up and helps sustain fledgling arts organizations like the one I cofounded, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. One of our institutional goals was providing low cost workshops for people who did not have the time or money to pursue a formal MFA program.
Thanks in part to our NEA funding, the AAWW ran workshops that attracted working Asian Americans who nurtured secret dreams of becoming writers. Celebrated writers Min Jin Lee, Monique Truong, and Cathy Park Hong are among the graduates of our early low-cost writing workshops, one taught by future Pulitzer prizewinner Jhumpa Lahiri.
I have no idea if I would have won an NEA this year. I don’t have a crystal ball to tell you how it would have affected American Dream. But no one else but me can write this story, and getting it out to an audience just got even more difficult, as almost every literary magazine I know of has recently lost their NEA funding. Meanwhile, my fellow writers and I know that our work has been unceremoniously dumped without being read at all; that our work, no matter how innovative and important, will never be funded by the NEA. And we know this leaves the future of American culture in a much darker place.
