In 2025 alone, public arts and humanities organizations have faced constant and systemic threats to their funding, their missions, and their ongoing goals to provide communities with access to the arts. The Trump administration's demolition of funding to the National Endowment for the Humanities immediately harmed the ongoing projects of organizations across the country, while imperiling most of the state humanities councils across the country. More recently, the rescindment of National Endowment for the Arts grants affected the publishing missions of nonprofit, independent publishers like Graywolf and Milkweed, while also shredding the community outreach efforts of public arts, literary arts, and literacy programs across the nation.

This has led to widespread concern amongst public arts and public humanities program directors—and rightly so. Despite this, though, program directors, writers, artists, and others in the public arts community have rallied together in order to preserve and protect the missions of their organizations.

This roundtable session seeks proposals that grapple with any aspect of sustaining and preserving public arts programming in light of the recent actions of the administrations. Proposals may address (but are not limited to) questions of securing funds in the absence of publicly available grants, managing resources, building alliances in the broader community, retooling programming, or identifying alternative ways of fulfilling an organization's mission. Proposals may come from anyone working in the literary arts or public humanities, though this session especially welcomes roundtable participants with experience running public arts and humanities programming in any capacity (i.e., volunteer, organization director, department chair of a literature or languages program, program administrator, university or indie press director/publisher, editors, public or university librarian, etc.). Through a roundtable discussion, this session will offer panelists and attendees a like with an opportunity to dialogue with the crises facing the public arts and humanities, while scoping out potential solutions to those vexing problems.

This roundtable will be held at the 2026 NeMLA conference in Pittsburgh, PA (March 5–8, 2026). This roundtable will be a hybrid session (i.e., in-person, but allowing for remote presentations/panelists). Interested presenters should submit a short abstract of approximately 300-words on their proposed contribution to the roundtable. Please note that all abstracts must be submitted through the NeMLA web portal.