A Black woman with braids cradling her face in her hands as she leans in front of a stack of books, symbolizing the enduring but fragile legacy of Black literary traditions.
Image Credit: Curated Lifestyle on Unsplash

Last year, NPQ spoke with Lisa Willis, the executive director of Cave Canem—an organization founded nearly 30 years ago by Toi Derricotte and writer Cornelius Eady to remedy the underrepresentation and isolation of Black poets in the literary landscape.

At the time, Willis mentioned that the organization was partnering with Ithaka S+R to develop a first-of-its-kind field study on Black literary arts service organizations to make a case for why these historically underresourced organizations need funding and support.

Willis’s case is even more urgent today, as arts organizations continue to be defunded by the federal government. The recent release of the report Magnitude and Bond: A Field Study on Black Literary Arts Organizations urges funders and others in power to do what they can to sustain these organizations.

In addition to Cave Canem, Magnitude and Bond looks at four other Black literary organizations. They are:

Collectively, these organizations are known as Getting Word: Black Literature for Black Liberation. In 2021, the organizations came together to build power through a collective annual fundraiser. Through the collective, they’ve built community and solidarity with each other, realizing that they are not alone in the challenges they face.

Funding Challenges

In an interview with NPQ, Duriel E. Harris, editor of Obsidian, compared finding community in the Getting Word Collective to a dehydrated person finding water—but not realizing how thirsty they were until they found it. “I needed this much more than I knew,” Harris said.

“If certain things don’t come into play by the end of this fiscal year…what do we do then?”

As Harris noted, this year marks Obsidian’s 50th year. Since its inception, the journal has featured various acclaimed writers, including prominent science fiction writer Octavia Butler. Yet even with this rich history, the organization’s future is uncertain.

“This is the 50th year, and we are not even positioned to do a gala or a whole bunch of celebrations. We don’t have the resources to do that. We’re still just trying to have the resources to do what we said we were doing as far as putting the journal out and doing the things we said we were going to do contractually because people’s careers depend on these things,” Harris said.

According to Harris, it’s hard to plan what the next decade or five years will look like because of the lack of resources. She says she has to scramble for resources each year because capacity-building grants available for literary arts organizations are often not multiyear grants. She has to continually raise money for the web editor and managing editor positions, which are critical to her team’s success.

“If certain things don’t come into play by the end of this fiscal year, which is June 2025, the question is, what do we do then?” she asked.

Harris is not alone in this sentiment. Candace Wiley, a founding director of The Watering Hole, which she describes as “the baby” of the Getting Word Collective, also expresses challenges with funding.

“It still takes labor. It still takes expertise. And you either do the labor, or you hire the expertise, but either way, it’s going to end up costing money.”

Wiley was inspired to start The Watering Hole after attending a workshop hosted by Cave Canem. After the workshop, she and her friend Monifa Lemons Jackson decided to host an event to bring poets together.

It was only intended to be a one-time event, but people were so inspired and hungry for a desire for space like that in the South, that Wiley knew that they had to keep the momentum going.

Out of this initial gathering, The Watering Hole was born. Its name is an homage to Cave Canem. It comes from a quote by poet Nikky Finney, who described Cave Canem as “the major watering hole and air pocket for Black poetry.”

At its core, The Watering Hole is a labor of love for Wiley—in the beginning, she did not get paid for her work there. But as the group began to add more programming, it became harder to sustain.

She noted that the greatest challenge in keeping The Watering Hole going is the funding.

“It still takes labor. It still takes expertise. And you either do the labor, or you hire the expertise, but either way, it’s going to end up costing money,” she said.

“It’s pretty simple, and there are folks who could make these problems go away if they just go ahead and recognize that they’re there and have the will to do it.”

Facilitating Capacity and Access

On a personal level, Wiley said that the Magnitude and Bond report has already affirmed her belief that her organization is on the right track and making an impact. She also hopes the report will help people understand how vastly the literary arts are underfunded, compared to other aspects of art and culture.

In all, the field study includes seven key findings:

  1. The resilience and longevity of organizations within the Getting Word Collective are deeply rooted in the lessons inherited from the legacy and perseverance of their ancestors.
  2. The formation of the Getting Word Collective represents a powerful act of resilience and a strategic step toward long-term sustainability.
  3. Developing a flexible strategic plan and formal succession plan is essential for advancing and sustaining organizational stability over time.
  4. Most employees within the organizations of the Getting Word Collective work on a part-time basis.
  5. Black literary arts organizations have long served as vital spaces for nurturing writers of color, with their origins tracing back to a time even before Emancipation. The essential nature of these organizations is the role they play in creating community, advancing networks, and making safe spaces for writers.
  6. Insufficient funding remains a fundamental challenge to organizational sustainability and growth, highlighting the need for funders to expand support for general operating expenses.
  7. Culturally specific groups within the literary arts field are among the most underresourced arts organizations. US organizations receive about $500 billion through charitable giving—about $25 billion of that is allocated to the arts, and even less to the literary arts.

Though these findings are concerning, in some ways they come at the right time.

As Harris notes, in this particular moment, there is a light shining on the greed and hoarding of resources in the United States. It is a time when institutions led by Black people and other people of color are being dismantled, and there is a growing need for people to have access to true information.

For these reasons, Harris says she is excited about the report and hopes that people will wrap their minds around the data in a concrete way.

“It’s shining light on something that we know very well in our own realities, in our own bodies, and the work that we do and the dreams that we have,” she said. “You need capacity, and you need access. It’s pretty simple, and there are folks who could make these problems go away if they just go ahead and recognize that they’re there and have the will to do it,” she said.