Anyway, here’s the official press release with my comments below:

National Endowment for the Arts Awards More Than $27.6 Million Across Nation
Includes $30,000 awarded to

Rochester, NY—In its first 50 years, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) awarded more than $5 billion in grants to recipients in every state and U.S. jurisdiction, the only arts funder in the nation to do so. Today, the NEA announced awards totaling more than $27.6 million in its first funding round of fiscal year 2016, including an Art Works award of $30,000 to Open Letter Books to publish four works of literature in translation.

The Art Works category supports the creation of work and presentation of both new and existing work, lifelong learning in the arts, and public engagement with the arts through 13 arts disciplines or fields.

NEA Chairman Jane Chu said, “The arts are part of our everyday lives—no matter who you are or where you live—they have the power to transform individuals, spark economic vibrancy in communities, and transcend the boundaries across diverse sectors of society. Supporting projects like the one from Open Letter Books offers more opportunities to engage in the arts every day.”

“The NEA’s funding to Open Letter is one of the key reasons for our continued success,” stated Chad W. Post, founder and director of Open Letter. “It allows us to continue to introduce English readers to important and innovative voices from around the world, both by helping subsidize the costs of translation, and by allowing us to do additional marketing for these books.”

The four titles included in this project are: The Brother by Rein Raud, translated from the Estonian by Adam Cullen (Estonia), One of Us Is Sleeping by Josefine Klougart, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken (Denmark), Gesell Dome by Guillermo Saccomanno, translated from the Spanish by Andrea Labinger (Argentina), and Chronicle of the Murdered House by Lucio Cardoso, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa (Brazil). All four titles will be published in 2016, and both Josefine Klougart and Guillermo Saccomanno will go on reading tours in the fall.

To join the Twitter conversation about this announcement, please use #NEAFall15. For more information on projects included in the NEA grant announcement, go to

To see the complete list of grantees by category, download this PDF. Here are some of the highlights that I think Three Percent readers will most be interested in:

Center for the Art of Translation: $35,000
Coffee House Press: $65,000
Graywolf Press: $80,000
Milkweed Editions: $50,000
Archipelago Books: $70,000
Words Without Borders: $30,000
Rain Taxi Review of Books: $10,000
Ugly Duckling Presse: $15,000
White Pine Press: $15,000
Nightboat Books: $10,000
Feminist Press at CUNY: $55,000
BOA Editions: $25,000
Copper Canyon Press: $70,000

Our grant for 2016 isn’t quite as high as the one for 2015, which makes it even more important than ever to so that we can continue to offer internships, maintain the Translation Database, pay translators a decent rate, introduce readers to international voices, run the Three Percent website, administer the Best Translated Book Award, and provide numerous benefits (tangible and not) to book culture as a whole. Without significant support, we won’t be able to keep all of these things going, so please consider donating to Every dollar helps.

Representative Jack Kingston, a Georgia Republican, wants to transfer the proposed NEA funding to highway construction. He failed to get the House to vote on his proposal, so he is now trying to get on the conference committee that will determine the fate of the funding. “We have real people out of work right now and putting $50 million in the NEA and pretending that’s going to save jobs as opposed to putting $50 million in a road project is disingenuous,” Kingston said in an interview yesterday, adding the time has come to examine all of NEA’s funding.

And when it was pointed out that the unemployment rate for artists was the same as the entire workforce (although it’s worth noting that there’s 46% unemployment rate among actors, and 19% for dancers), you get gems of logic like this:

But opponents of the funding say that many groups of workers don’t receive special funding. Brad Dayspring, a spokesman for Cantor, said the provision “uses taxpayer dollars on NEA programs instead of common-sense tax relief targeted to revitalize small businesses and create jobs for middle-class families facing economic challenges” and “fails to meet the standard necessary to be included in an emergency economic recovery plan.”

If I could do a videocast, everyone could see how visibly pissed I am about this . . . Putting aside questions about funding for the arts and how NEA’s money is allocated to both organizations and artists, and ignoring for a moment the oft-documented fact that arts spending does create jobs, let’s just look at the number for a second: this $50 million for the NEA is 0.006% of the total $819 billion package.

Not 6%. Or even 0.1%. But 0.006%. 1/16,380th of the proposed spending.

And that’s not even factoring in the $800 billion plus that allowed Wall Street firms to stay in business and give themselves $20 billion in bonuses. The proposed $50 million for NEA is 1/400 of the amount these people—“people” who essentially ran a Ponzi scheme that bankrupted the world and has damaged everyone’s quality of life for years to come—received just last month thanks to nearly $1 trillion in taxpayer money.

But politicians are pissed about giving money for arts organizations or artists? Really?

It’s silly to have to make an argument for the arts, and trying to change a typical politicians mind is about as easy as ending world hunger, but really, the value of what the NEA does goes well beyond the jobs it creates. The arts make life better. Plain and simple. And spending a infinitesimal part of a stimulus package on arts organizations benefits the entire country.

Dana Gioia has an awesome quote in this article:

Dana Gioia, a poet who was NEA chairman until last month, recalled that when top Roosevelt aide Harry Hopkins was asked why the government wanted to hire so many artists and writers, he replied, “Hell, they’ve got to eat just like other people.”

Gioia, reflecting on that comment, said, “As far as I’ve heard, nothing has changed about the dietary needs of artists.”

I feel like we’re right back in the mid-1990s. . . . Initially, one might think that the arts would benefit with a democrat in the White House. But historically, that hasn’t really helped, and it’s during these periods that the NEA comes under the most scrutiny and loses the most funding. Clinton never stood up for public arts funding, probably due to the fact that from a presidential perspective there’s not much at stake and to use up political capital on something like this just isn’t worth it.

I really hope Obama is different. If he doesn’t go to bat for the arts and for including this pittance in the ever-ballooning (and rightfully so) stimulus efforts, all of his promises of change will ring awfully hollow to me.