Cave Canem, a nonprofit dedicated to fostering the careers of Black poets, has released Magnitude & Bond: A Field Study on Black Literary Arts Organizations, a new project documenting how Black writing communities sustain their creative and scholarly work.
In partnership with education research firm Ithaka S+R, and supported by a grant from the Wallace Foundation, Cave Canem surveyed a collective of five Black literary organizations known as Getting Word: Black Literature for Black Liberation. Participants from Getting Word talked about barriers to Black writers in the broader literary arts field, assessed funding models and succession plans in their organizations, and described the financial and volunteer resources they relied upon.
Ithaka S+R senior analyst Deirdre Harkins and researcher Liam Sweeney wrote Magnitude & Bond’s executive summary. The study’s title comes from “Paul Robeson,” a 1970 poem by Gwendolyn Brooks expressing that “we are each other’s/magnitude and bond.” In the poem, Brooks underscores the importance of Black people being in mutual support and defense of “each other’s harvest” and “each other’s business.”
“Even within the literary arts discipline, poetry is the least funded, and I realized that we were without data to back up the scarcity that we saw,” Cave Canem executive director Lisa Willis told PW. “There have not been to date, to our knowledge, any research projects or papers written on the Black literary arts community” and its specific needs, so Magnitude & Bond creates a record of Black organizations’ efforts.
On April 5–6 in Washington, D.C., Cave Canem plans to cohost a number of free public programs around the release of the field study. The weekend starts with a conversation at Howard University between elder poet Sterling Plumpp and Cave Canem fellow Duriel E. Harris, who edits Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora. Plumpp and Harris will discuss Black literary organizing prior to Cave Canem, which was founded by poets Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady in 1996.
Additional events, hosted by Simon & Schuster senior editor Yahdon Israel, will take place at the National Museum of African American History and Culture; actor Jermaine Fowler will deliver a keynote, Trinidadian American poet Lauren K. Alleyne (Honeyfish) and Harlem-based feminist poet Taiwo will read from their work, and Willis will present on Magnitude and Bond’s findings.
Funding Black Literature
Willis, who joined Cave Canem in 2020 and has been its executive director since 2021, spent two decades in the performing arts world, where she worked in artistic administration for New York Live Arts and other organizations. “It’s been very interesting to come into the literary space, because it’s the least funded of all of the arts disciplines,” Willis said. “It's not even recognized as part of the arts disciplines, when in conversation about those fields,” which is a “detriment” to securing funding.
During the pandemic, Willis noted, “Broadway and certain performing arts were able to make the case” for greater financial support “and tie it to the economic impact of not having shows, but the literary field was challenged in doing that.”
Willis explained that the problem is magnified for Black organizations, as evidenced during the pandemic and concurrent Black Lives Matter movement. “Between June and September 2020, when there was that bump of people buying books and investing in Black-owned businesses in the community, Cave Canem did see a bit of increased support, but that was not the case for other literary organizations of color,” Willis said. “That’s one of the main reasons that Getting Word was started, as a way to have advocacy”—and how Magnitude & Bond came about.
The timing of Magnitude & Bond is significant, given the financial precarity facing arts organizations today and the threats to groups with a mission of diversity, equity, and inclusion. “One of the key takeaways is that our destinies are tied,” Willis said. “When there’s scarcity and tension in the larger field, under-resourcing is hyper-magnified for those of us impacted by intersectional disparities. As the system shakes, and resources are divided amongst the organizations that have always gotten them, it further increases the lack for us.” Yet she believes Black organizations “have a history of being dynamic and figuring out other ways to exist.”
Meanwhile, Willis cautions against any reliance on “free labor” and the individual donations that make up for a lack of federal funding. “We are very aware that the literary field is underfunded,” which leads to operational shortfalls, unpaid staff, and “rampant volunteerism,” Willis said. “But something that’s unique in this scenario is that, with Black literary organizations, there’s a centuries-long history of free labor that continues to this day.” Historically, Black people “are the only community of people in the United States with a history of being legally prohibited from reading,” making Magnitude & Bond's representation all the more essential to the national record.
