In May, as President Trump pushed to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Beyond Baroque’s NEA grant—awarded last year—was canceled.

The Venice-based literary arts center, known for nurturing and promoting Los Ángeles poets for more than fifty years, suddenly faced the loss of one of its most important sources of funding.

In an email, Beyond Baroque’s new Poetry Coalition Fellow in Communications & Development, Barbara Fant, said, “Because of the termination of this grant, we cannot host this year’s Southern California Poetry Festival.”

The Poetry Festival, founded in 2016 by poets Sonia Greenfield and Donna Hilbert in partnership with the Poetry Foundation, is an annual celebration of the art of poetry and the diversity of voices within Southern California. In its six years, the last four (2018, 2022-2024) hosted by Beyond Baroque included generative workshops on the craft of poetry, readings in the Wanda Coleman Theatre featuring emerging and established voices in the Greater Los Ángeles literary community, featured local publishers such as El Martillo Press and Punk Hostage Press and local literary organizations such as Women Who Submit and DSTL Arts.

Usually held in mid-November, Beyond Baroque had taken over organizing and curating the festival, in part, to give it a permanent home, as an original intent of moving the festival to a new location each year to engage different communities and to increase its accessibility became too difficult to manage logistically.

“While the loss of this funding impacts us financially,” Fant said in the same email, “it does not hinder our drive and spirit.”

As such, Beyond Baroque has pivoted to host no fest on November 15, a poetry marathon fundraiser featuring 80 local poets. According to their Instagram post, “a full day of poetry, books, and community in support of our mission to sustain literary and artistic experimentation in Los [Á]ngeles and beyond!”

In line with their mission, no fest will be broken up into segments, each spotlighting a different theme reflecting their values and community spirit.

“[W]e are a space built on and for the community,” Fant said. “[W]e are not halting our mission” because of NEA funding cuts.

Instead, Beyond Baroque, like other local arts organizations, has been forced to rethink how they’re funded, begun to scale back the amount of programming they offer and change how they offer their programming, ensuring the way they are funded and the programming they’re able to produce, will connect even deeper with the community they serve.

In Beyond Baroque’s case, the poetry marathon fundraiser, is to help make up for the funding cuts caused by the cancellation of their NEA grant.

As arts organizations feel the increasing political and societal effects of the culture wars, with new NEA grant guidelines eliminating programs for historically underserved communities and prioritizing projects that align with a certain ‘heritage’ or patriotic framing, answers to questions about who gets to define what American culture, values and identity are, and who gets to make and present art are now being taken directly out of their hands.

For Beyond Baroque, the cancellation of this year’s Southern California Poetry Festival is a tangible reminder that these broader debates over culture and funding have real world consequences for the poets and artists and communities who rely on spaces like theirs. And how arts and literary institutions continue to evolve.