How to Get Paid

Literary nonprofits.

TALK to writers working for literary nonprofits and two words come up a lot: mission and community. Paychecks can be fatter in corporate America, these writers say, and professors get to take the summer off to write, but working at a literary nonprofit brings with it the satisfaction of serving the mission of helping writers and building a literary community.

“I think the only reason a person works in nonprofits is to serve the mission,” says Britt Udesen, executive and artistic director of the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. “At the Loft we’re a lot of book nerds. We really, really believe in the essential nature of reading and writing. Otherwise we would all be working at banks.”

The trade-off, of course, is that they don’t pull down a banker’s salary. Udesen estimates that staffers working at literary nonprofits earn 30 percent to 40 percent less than their counterparts in similar positions at for-profit companies. “I’ve done a little bit of corporate work in my life,” she says. “I think one of the reasons that some of us stay with nonprofits is that we believe in the work that we do, and we believe that if we have to spend fifty or sixty hours a week doing something, it may as well be something that makes us feel like we’re serving our community.”

But this doesn’t mean Udesen’s book nerds have to take an oath of poverty. Although it is hard to find reliable salary surveys for literary nonprofits, a 2013 study by the Americans for the Arts found that salaries for full-time senior staff at local arts organizations—broadly defined as “arts councils, arts commissions, service organizations, arts funds, and myriad other variations”—averaged about $66,000 a year. Of course, an organization’s size, annual budget, and location—as well as how high up the organizational chart a given position falls—all determine how much money one can expect to earn at a nonprofit.

Most nonprofits are overseen by a board of directors, usually made up of unpaid volunteers, who guide the organization and help with fundraising. Community-based nonprofits, like the Loft in Minneapolis or Hugo House, a writing center in Seattle, host writing classes and literary events, while organizations such as Poets & Writers, the nonprofit that publishes this magazine, and the Academy of American

Poets have a more national reach. Poets & Writers offers funding to writers in New York and California as well as eight cities in between through its Readings & Workshops program and provides information and support to writers through this magazine and the website pw.org, and the Academy of American Poets is a member-supported organization that champions the art form among readers, educators, and poets. Other nonprofits run writing conferences and host residencies, dispense grants and fellowships, or advocate for causes such as literacy and free speech.

In recent decades a growing number of literary nonprofits have sprung up to support historically underrepresented literary communities such as African American poets and writers (Cave Canem and the Hurston/Wright Foundation), Asian American writers (Kundiman and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop), queer writers (Lambda Literary Foundation), and disabled writers (Zoeglossia).

Writers interested in working at a literary nonprofit can search online listings such as the ones curated by Poets & Writers, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), and the Academy of American Poets, all of which offer details about jobs at nonprofits alongside those in academia, publishing, and other fields. However, many staffers at literary nonprofits report finding their jobs through personal or professional networks.

This can lead to a lack of diversity in hiring at literary nonprofits, not unlike that in the for-profit publishing industry, in which 86 percent of employees are white and 80 percent are women, according to a 2017 Publishers Weekly survey. The 2013 Americans for the Arts survey found strikingly similar numbers at local arts organizations, where 86 percent of full-time senior staffers were white and 72 percent were women.

Some of this homogeneity may be self-reinforcing, says Cathy Linh Che, executive director of Kundiman, a New York City–based nonprofit dedicated to promoting Asian American writers and literature. “I’ve noticed that inside of any sector, a lot of people are hired because of recommendations, so if the current hiring manager is hiring from recommendations from their peers and their peers are all white, they might bring in more white staff because that’s just the circles that people run in,” says Che.

The modest pay, along with the years of education and unpaid internships required for many jobs at literary nonprofits, may also discourage some people from applying. “Nonprofits don’t always pay very well,” Che notes, “so somebody who might need to have enough money not only for themselves, but to provide for their families—I’m not just talking about their children; I have friends who help out their parents, as well—may not be able to take a job at a nonprofit.”

The lack of diversity may be changing, albeit slowly. For one thing, organizations that focus on a particular underrepresented community, like

Cave Canem or Kundiman, often hire staff from within that community. But even nonprofits with a broader mandate have long felt the pressure to diversify their staff and their target audience. Regional funding agencies like the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs routinely ask organizations applying for funding to explain the steps they’re taking to diversify their workforce, and the National Endowment for the Arts has historically asked applicants to identify their target audience by ethnicity and age. Other funders like the Amazon Literary Partnership, a philanthropic arm of the online retail giant, make it clear that they are especially interested in funding projects that serve culturally diverse groups.

For writers like Sue Landers, who took over as executive director of the Lambda Literary Foundation last year, the chance to promote underrepresented writers and broaden the literary conversation is a big part of the job’s appeal. Before joining the foundation, which runs the Lambda Literary Awards, Landers had spent sixteen years at the College Board, the organization that oversees the SAT. A poet and author of three books, Landers left the College Board in 2017 to focus on her own writing, but when the directorship of Lambda Literary opened up, she leaped at the chance to put her administrative skills to work in the service of literature and queer writing.

“It was time for me to bring all my lives together,” she says. “I really enjoyed working at the College Board, but it wasn’t books. It wasn’t making art. It wasn’t supporting queer kids. My time on earth is limited, and I thought, ‘How do I want to contribute to the world?’ I want to help people make art, and I want to help queer people make art in particular.”

Landers takes special pride in Lambda’s LGBTQ Writers in Schools program, which brings LGBTQ authors into public school classrooms across New York City to discuss their books and their lives. “Being able to meet a living writer can be transformative to a young person,” she says. “Bringing LGBTQ books into schools is a big deal as well because this is often the only time kids are reading queer books in school.”

This is a recurring theme in conversations with writers at literary nonprofits, who say that just because the work can be administrative doesn’t mean it can’t also scratch a creative itch. At the Loft, Udesen tapped the organizational talents of her staff to create a new literary festival, Wordplay, slated for May of this year, which will bring more than a hundred writers from around the world to Minneapolis, where the Loft is based. At Kundiman, Che helped organize a Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon, which brought together fifty-five writers on two separate occasions to refine existing articles about Asian American literature and to write new ones.

Beyond the gratification of the work itself, literary nonprofits offer writers

perks they could never find at a regular office job. Seattle’s Hugo House, for instance, built a row of enclosed writing booths into its new home in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, which opened last fall. Nicole McCarthy, a poet who joined the organization as a development coordinator in 2018, has made a habit of ducking into one of these booths after work for a few focused hours of writing. “One of the coolest things about my job is that I can work a nine-to-five job and then take two hours up front to write, and then if we have a poetry or a prose reading that night, I’ll stay for that,” she says.

Then, too, at literary nonprofits staff often get to participate in classes and other programs the organization offers for free or at greatly reduced cost. At the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in Tennessee, which is largely supported by the estate of playwright Tennessee Williams, associate director of marketing and admissions Adam Latham not only sits in on readings and craft talks during the annual twelve-day conference, but is also entitled to a one-on-one session with a workshop leader each summer to discuss his own fiction. In his eight years at Sewanee, Latham has worked with novelists Tim O’Brien, Adrianne Harun, and Steve Yarbrough.

“Every time I go through the conference, it helps refill the well,” he says. “We’re sponges, and we absorb more than we realize. My writing gets a bump every time I go through that cycle.”

A subtler but perhaps even more important benefit of working at a literary nonprofit is that they’re typically run by writers or dedicated readers who are serious about helping their staff maintain their artistic practice. At Hugo House, McCarthy credits executive director Tree Swenson with encouraging her to put a premium on her creative work. “If she knows I’m under a tight deadline,” McCarthy says, “she’s the first one to push me out the door at five o’clock, saying, ‘No, no, no, go home. Go work on your writing.’”

At the Loft, Udesen carries this philosophy a step further, allowing writers on staff to take a leave when they’re awarded writing residencies and counting one employee’s annual attendance at the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference as paid professional development. “We have people here who are curating experiences for readers and writers so they need to have their own experiences as readers and writers,” she explains. “That feeds back into their work on a daily basis. We’re not robots.”

Still, work at a literary nonprofit is work, and despite flexible schedules and supportive bosses, writers have to fit in their writing around a nine-to-five workday. Poet Christopher Kondrich, who left academia last year to work as an associate editor at the Writer’s Chronicle, a magazine published by the nonprofit AWP, says he’s finding the transition a challenge. To get his writing done Kondrich has to wake up very early while his wife and young daughter are still asleep or else struggle to find inspiration in the

evening after a full day at the office.

“This is entirely different from finding various chunks of time throughout the work day while teaching,” he says. “You have to be so much more deliberate and organized and strategic to sustain a writing project. It’s really, really hard, especially since graduate school still feels relatively fresh and recent to me.”

For Kondrich, adjustment to life at a nonprofit has been complicated by the recent upheaval at AWP, which last year fired its longtime director and ended its institutional relationship with the University of Maryland.

Indeed, tight budgets and the everpresent pressure to secure funding can wear on managers and staff alike. But for some writers, working at a literary nonprofit can be a way to deepen their commitment to their artistic practice. Before he started at Sewanee in 2011, Latham worked in publishing for several years, first in South Carolina and then in New York City, but found he had to choose between writing fiction and building a career in publishing. He chose writing and moved to Tennessee, where he took the job at the conference.

In spring and summer, as the conference admissions season gears up, Latham puts in his share of twelve-hour workdays, but he says he makes an effort to write every day. “I get up early to write, and if for some reason my day doesn’t allow me to write in the morning, then I write in the evening,” he says. “Often it can come at the expense of sleep, but I try to write every day.”

Writers who can’t make their peace with the demands of a full-time office job at a literary nonprofit risk becoming frustrated or burning out, says Udesen, the Loft director. “Being an arts administrator is not being an artist,” she says. “Sometimes people go into arts administration because they love the art or they are artists themselves, and I know that that can be really frustrating, that you’re really close to it, but you’re building the spreadsheets and marketing the program and talking to the funders. You’re not actually getting to do the writing.”

Burnout can happen in any job, but it’s a special risk at nonprofits, where salaries are low and resources are limited. The flip side is that, at nonprofits, relatively junior staffers often tackle complex, interesting projects they might have to wait years to be assigned in the corporate world, in which job descriptions are more narrowly defined and office hierarchies more rigid. And of course working at a literary nonprofit allows writers to help fellow writers.

“You hear so much about writers working in isolation,” says Sewanee’s Latham. “Part of the benefit of working for a literary nonprofit is the community I get. There’s an inherent satisfaction in helping anyone, but when you’re helping someone become a better writer and you’re a writer yourself, it pays dividends. You’re just doing it because you want to help people do something that you love.”