Resilience and Legacy

Black literary arts organizations have fostered many of the country’s most esteemed writers. How have they done so, despite the limited resources available to them? Cave Canem, a literary organization that supports poets in the African diaspora, worked with research firm Ithaka S+R to find out. 

Researchers conducted a literature review and surveyed the staffers, board members, and audiences of Cave Canem and four other Black literary organizations: Furious Flower Poetry Center, the Hurston/Wright Foundation, Obsidian, and The Watering Hole. This brief, a summary of the full report published by Ithaka S+R, outlines their findings and implications for others in the field. 

Black literary organizations, researchers write, have been essential players in the history of American arts and letters since the early 1800s. They opened a world of literature for Black Americans, many of whom were prohibited from learning how to read or write. 

The organizations the researchers studied continue this tradition. They support writers, offer grants, organize workshops, publish literary works, and host retreats and conferences. Audiences and community members say they build relationships among a wide variety of writers and readers. 

They do so with limited resources, researchers add. Funding is limited, with one organization operating on a budget of just $44,000 in 2021. Their leaders are masters of the literary arts, but few have the financial, legal, or managerial expertise they sometimes need. Just one organization had a full-time, paid executive director. Other leaders were either part-time employees or volunteers. 

The brief points to three implications of the research: 

1. Organizations could consider investing in community-building experiences such as festivals to engage audiences.
2. Leaders could consider assembling boards with managerial expertise to complement their own literary expertise.
3. Funders could support the sustainability of Black literary organizations by investing in strategic-planning efforts to build capacity and audience-assessment efforts to help guide programming.