The thirty-year relationship between Copper Canyon Press and the Lannan Foundation began with a printing error. When poet Hayden Carruth’s 1992 book Collected Shorter Poems arrived at the press’s headquarters with a table of contents printed out of order—after he won the National Book Critics Circle Award and became a finalist for the National Book Award—the philanthropist J. Patrick Lannan Jr. came to the rescue with several thousand dollars to finance a reprinting.
“That was the start of their helping us out, getting us out of a jam,” said Michael Wiegers, the executive editor and artistic director at Copper Canyon, a nonprofit poetry publisher based in Port Townsend, Washington, since 1974. J. Patrick Lannan Jr., the Lannan Foundation’s former chief executive and the son of its founder, had been reading poetry since he was a child. So in 1986, when he became the leader of his family’s foundation, he expanded its focus from visual art to include grants, awards, fellowships, an event series, and a residency program for the literary world, particularly nonprofit presses and the writers published with them. This was a rarity in philanthropy, which traditionally funnels vast sums to mainstream institutions like museums, performing-arts centers, and libraries. Nonprofit presses, founded in the 1970s and 1980s to liberate writers from the demands of corporate publishing, often put out experimental, boundary-pushing works by lesser-known writers—many from underrepresented backgrounds—who then go on to influence the wider market. (Blockbuster literary authors like Hernan Diaz, Ocean Vuong, Jericho Brown, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Leslie Jamison, Claudia Rankine, and Maggie Nelson have all published with nonprofits, or still do.)
But like many other family foundations, the Lannan Foundation could not exist in perpetuity, and for years it forewarned grantees of its eventual closure. In early 2022, a few months before Patrick’s death, Copper Canyon and fellow grantees received notice that the Lannan Foundation would wind down operations by 2032, giving them ten years to make up the funding difference. Patrick died in July, and by 2023, Wiegers said, “we were told that there was no more, and there would be no more.” Almost overnight, Copper Canyon’s $1.4 million operating budget decreased by $200,000.
“It feels chaotic. It feels like the whole field is kind of in turmoil.”
The “sunsetting” of the Lannan Foundation highlights the uncertainty underpinning much of the arts ecosystem in the United States, and the necessity of both innovation and diversified funding models in the world of nonprofit arts institutions. Yearslong decreases in corporate charitable giving and overall charitable giving made The Chronicle of Philanthropy ask, in January, “Has the giving crisis reached the point of no return?” Similarly, Vox wondered in July, “Are we actually in the middle of a generosity crisis?”…