Oh, the Humanities
Just a few weeks ago, our friends at the Mississippi Humanities Council presented us with an incredible honor, the 2025 Humanities Partner Award, at its annual awards ceremony. It was a special night that involved getting dressed up, making a speech, and meeting amazing people from all over our state who are involved in projects that engage with Mississippi’s history and culture.
As soon as we returned from the celebration, we were back to work at our next nonprofit project sponsored by the Mississippi Humanities Council and the Mississippi Arts Commission — an educational program for Mississippi K-12 students to kick off National Poetry Month.
With Mississippi Poet Laureate Catherine Pierce, we staged the Mississippi Young Writers’ Poetry Festival, which gave over 125 schoolchildren statewide the opportunity to develop their creative writing talents. Over two days at Delta State University and the University of Southern Mississippi, students shared their award-winning poems with each other, their families, and their teachers. They participated in workshops led by a dozen professional poets from Mississippi, and they were inspired by a keynote presentation by National Youth Poet Laureate Stephanie Pacheco. We also held a public event at the Mississippi Museum of Art with Nadia Wright, a Jackson high school student who earned the special honor of National Student Poet awarded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
As these events unfolded, we learned that all of the federal funding to the National Endowment for the Humanities was abruptly terminated — including the final installment of the grant we were awarded from MHC to make them happen. Their funding represented half of our budget for this program.
With the MHC funding we have received thus far, we were able to rent one of the event venues; compensate five of the workshop leaders; bring in our keynote speaker; pay for nine of the 11 hotel rooms we needed for the guest speakers, instructors, and staff; and cover airfare for one of our guest speakers. The remaining $1,000.00, which we now will not receive, was budgeted to cover another guest speaker’s airfare, the other two hotel rooms, and a car rental and gas for the 1,000 mile drive to all of the event sites across Mississippi.
To fill the gap, we’re tapping into more private funding. You can help us by contributing to our nonprofit account at the CREATE Foundation, our fiscal sponsor.
But this is not our only program that will be impacted. Over 1,000 people attended the inaugural Possumtown Book Fest last summer, and humanities funding provided 25% of the budget. While we are prepared to pivot and increase our reliance on private funding to put on this year’s festival, the opportunity to receive government grants helped our program get off the ground and brought other funders to the table — and now we’ll need to ask you for more donations so we can bring authors to a part of the rural South that is regularly overlooked by the book industry.
We are, of course, not the only organization affected by this turmoil. We have learned that our state council has a significant amount of federal funding that was already appropriated to the NEH and committed to the MHC that is now inaccessible.
In the five years since I moved back to Mississippi and started Friendly City Books, the MHC has been there for me every step of the way. Will you join me and be there for them now?
Make your voice heard by calling or writing to your representatives in Congress or sign the petition on Change.org started by fellow Mississippians. You can also contribute to the MHC directly at mshumanities.org/donate.
Restoring the NEH and its grant pipeline from federal funding to the MHC in our state to nonprofits like ours means that our efforts to make our communities an attractive place to live and visit are not in vain.