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May 14, 2025

Last week, Bennington Review was notified that our 2025 funding offer from the National Endowment from the Arts has been withdrawn. The NEA will now "focus funding on projects that reflect the nation's rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the President," and the government believes that we no longer align with these priorities.

We are one of the many literary and arts organizations to receive this same news. As Bennington Review operates on a shoestring budget, the rescinded $10,000 grant is a significant loss that will directly impact our ability to cover skyrocketing printing and shipping costs, which have doubled in recent years, and make it more challenging for us to fairly compensate all of our contributors.

: It would make an enormous difference for us if in the month of May we were to raise $10,000 to recoup the lost funds.

Bennington Review has a nearly sixty-year history. Since its relaunch in 2016, it has featured innovative, intelligent, and moving work by hundreds of emerging and established poets, prose writers, and translators, including a high school student and winners of the Pulitzer Prize, contemporary authors from China and Spain and Mozambique and North Macedonia, experimental film criticism and long-form interviews with writers, literature that is exciting and surprising, at once graceful and reckless. Work from Bennington Review has appeared in Best American Poetry, Best American Short Fiction, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. In addition to the withdrawn grant from the National Endowment from the Arts, we have been recognized with the “Firecracker” Award for Best Debut Magazine from the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses, a Whiting Foundation Literary Magazine Prize, a CLMP Capacity-Building grant, and a grant from the Ponsold-Motherwell Foundation.

Another way Bennington Review stands out as a literary journal is its commitment to training undergraduate students in literary screening, editing, and publishing. Every year, between twenty and thirty undergraduates at 51�������� get invaluable pre-professional hands-on experience as assistants for Bennington Review, adding their voices and perspectives as they train themselves to make discerning editorial decisions.

To show your support for Bennington Review and its mission, and to take a stand with us and the writers whose work we champion,  to our emergency campaign.

Thank you,

Michael Dumanis
Director, Poetry at Bennington
Editor, Bennington Review
Literature Faculty
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