To understand the challenges the Utah Humanities Book Festival faced this year, you have to go back to April 3.
That was the day, according to Jodi Graham, the executive director of the nonprofit Utah Humanities, that the organization received an email out of the blue, letting them know that their operating support grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities had been canceled.
That meant a loss of over $1 million — half of Utah Humanities’ operating budget.
The email came as DOGE, a department headed up by Elon Musk earlier this year, was tasked with cutting government spending. Utah Humanities, which has hosted programs and offered grants to organizations across Utah for 50 years, was hardly the only group affected. Arts groups across the country saw their funding slashed overnight.
But for Utah, this had real impacts on events and programs across the state, and for Utah Humanities, it meant pausing its 50-year-old grant program and dramatically reducing its Humanities in the Wild events.
Which brings us back to the Utah Humanities Book Festival, which is on its 28th year and is the only statewide book festival in Utah. After the funding cuts, the festival’s budget was cut by 30%.
This meant that the festival had some hard choices to make — and some difficult conversations with organizations the festival had partnered with in the Utah book community.
But those festival partners, said Kase Johnstun, who is program manager for Utah Center for the Book and has run the festival for the last three years, weren’t going to let it drop. So with help from groups across the state — from local libraries to bookstores to universities — the Utah Humanities Book Festival is back this year with a “robust” lineup that includes author readings, discussions and workshops. It even, for the first time in 10 years, has brought back the Utah Book Awards, which celebrates the work of local authors and the state’s literary culture.
“We’re just glad to be here this year,” Johnstun told the Deseret News.
28 years of the Utah Humanities Book Festival
The festival has certainly grown from its beginnings in 1998, when it was known as The Great Salt Lake Book Festival. In its first year, it was a one-day event. Now, it’s expanded to host events throughout the entire month of October.
The goal of the Utah Humanities Book Festival is different than that of many other book festivals, according to Johnstun, who is is an author himself and is also Utah’s representative to the Library of Congress.
That goal “is to really create statewide conversation based on whatever book we’re discussing and whatever author that we bring in,” Johnstun said.
“We’re using the book as the vehicle and the author as the driver to really open up conversations.”
In order to spark those conversations, Johnstun says the festival’s events are organized to be interactive, making sure to leave plenty of time for audience discussion.
Those events include appearances by authors, including a “Reese’s Book Club Mystery Night,” featuring authors like Ally Condie whose books have been included in actress Reese Witherspoon’s book club, and (for the first time) a Utah Horror Day with authors Philip Fracassi and Stephen Graham Jones.
Johnstun also prioritized bringing back the Utah Book Awards after a 10-year hiatus, honoring work this year by seven Utah authors, including Maggie St. Clair, Jennifer A. Nielsen and poet Paisley Rekdal.
Another important goal of the festival is making sure that communities across the state of Utah, not just in the Salt Lake area, are included.
“One of the really biggest advantages is being able to get not only local authors but national authors to places that typically wouldn’t be able to host them,” said Graham, who’s led Utah Humanities since 2018. “So really giving opportunities for communities to participate when they aren’t on the Wasatch Front.”
How the festival lost its funding — and Utah’s book community stepped in
When Utah Humanities received the email on April 3, letting them know their federal funding had been cut, it went to their “malicious emails” folder, because it hadn’t been sent by a government email address, Graham said.
But the email said that it was from the chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a government agency that has provided funding to Utah Humanities for 50 years. Since it was created in 1965, the NEH has awarded over $6.4 billion in funding to over 70,000 projects in all 50 states, according to The New York Times.
“Half of our operating support budget comes from the National Endowment,” said Graham. “So when we received that email, we literally lost, we just lost half our budget overnight.”
Through fundraising efforts and some assistance of the Federation of State Humanities Councils, Utah Humanities has received some support over the last few months. But things still haven’t been easy.
The book festival had to make do with a much smaller budget this year — which was a challenge for Johnstun, particularly as he worked to coordinate with the festivals’ many partners, including libraries, bookstores and universities, across the state.
“There were multiple times this spring when I teared up because I had to call partners and say, ‘We’re not where we were,’” Johnstun said.
But the festivals’ partners from across Utah’s book community stepped up.
“When we reached out to everyone across the state and said, ‘We don’t have the amount of funds that we had before,’ our partners were so giving‚” he said. “We had people saying ... ‘We can make this happen. This will work. This is our book festival. This is 28 years. We can find money ourselves. We can make this happen.’”
Many of the partners offered to volunteer or donate venue space to help out, according to Johnstun. Some of the festival’s partners include the Salt Lake City and County libraries, local publishing companies like Torrey House Press, and many of the state’s universities, including Weber State and the Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah.
Graham sees this coming together as a unique facet of Utah’s arts community, noting that something similar happened when many arts and cultural organizations were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“When the arts and cultural community in Utah is in crisis, we have a tendency to band together, and rally together in support of each other,” Graham said.
“Arts and culture are in our DNA,” she added.
What does the future hold for Utah Humanities?
When it comes to the future of Utah Humanities — and the arts in general for Utah — Graham says she’s “cautiously optimistic,” even though “we’re not in the clear.” Particularly as the government shutdown drags on, leaving hanging questions about the fate of the National Endowment of the Humanities.
“I’m cautiously optimistic, because of the strength of what we do and what we’ve been doing, and not only us but our partners and sort of Utah’s larger cultural community,” she said. “We have really great bipartisan support in Congress, and I don’t think that that has changed. I think that we still have that.”
Even so, Graham says there are “a lot of challenges” ahead. But she says there are ways that Utahns can help.
The first way to help? Come and participate in the Utah Humanities Book Festival, Graham said.
“And if you really like what you see, reach out to the people who represent you and tell them why it’s important to you. Tell them why you think this is a good thing to support and let your voice be heard. So join the conversation.”
For both Graham and Johnstun, it all comes down to creating opportunities for conversation and discussion in the community. And to both of them, books are an ideal opening for those conversations.
In some ways, books can serve as a “buffer” or a “shield” to help people discuss more serious topics, including politics, Johnstun said. They can also help people connect over deeper, shared truths.
“Because we’re all human and we’re all sharing this world, and we’re all sharing our lives together,” he said. “And we all experience the same things, right? Love, life, death, disappointment, growing, losing people.”
Remembering our shared humanity is particularly important at this moment in time, according to Graham.
“What we all need so much more of in the current state of our world is to have those moments to interact with each other and to be able to gather in a space in person and have that face-to-face conversation and that exchange of ideas,” she said. “So many of ... the problems and the things that we’re seeing happen, those are just gonna continue until we can start seeing each other as humans again.”