WASHINGTON D.C. — Rep’s Ted W. Lieu (D-Los Angeles County) and Teresa Leger Fernández (D-NM) introduced the 21st Century Federal Writers’ Project Act, legislation to create a new grant program administered by the National Endowment for the Arts that will empower America’s writers and journalists to capture and document the American experience.
As the nation approaches the 250th anniversary of its founding, this legislation establishes a coordinated national effort to chronicle the full breadth of American life across all 56 states and territories. Modeled on the Federal Writers’ Project (1935-1943), the 21st Century Federal Writers’ Project Act will support writers in documenting the histories, communities, customs, and everyday experiences that define the country today. The bill also creates a nationally administered and searchable repository to preserve these books and other media, ensuring that the stories gathered during the semiquincentennial era remain accessible to future generations of Americans.
“From the beaches of Los Angeles to the mountains of West Virginia, from the dairy farms of Wisconsin to the fishing vessels of Alaska, the American experience has a wide array of history, culture, customs, and communities. As we honor the 250th anniversary of the United States, let us celebrate what defines this great country – its people,” said Congressman Lieu. “The 21st Century Federal Writers’ Project Act will not only support writers and journalists – many of whom have lost their jobs in recent years – it will memorialize what it means to be American. The stories of today should not go untold.”
“Reporters, writers, and poets have always opened our eyes to the realities of the world around us. As the Trump administration tries to rewrite and sanitize the complex history of America itself, their work is more important than ever. With this legislation, our writers will be able to apply for federal funds to continue documenting American life as it looks like now,” said Congresswoman Leger Fernández. “Representative Ted Lieu and I are reintroducing the 21st Century Federal Writers’ Project to revive the 1935 program that gave us an inside look at how diverse the American experience is across the country. This project gives our storytellers the opportunity to shape how American history will remember the 21st century.”
Support for this bill:
“As a college student from Tehran studying in Oklahoma, I first fell under the spell of the original Federal Writers Project and its guides to all the American states. Many of the great authors nurtured by the Writers’ Project, from Zora Neale Hurston to Saul Bellow to Ralph Ellison, still console and inspire me to this day. I have seen firsthand what happens when a nation’s people stop listening to each other and become strangers. Please, I implore you to pass the 21st-Century Federal Writers’ Project Act, and help a new generation of American writers to spare my adopted country a similar fate,” said Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran.
“As the inaugural Literary Director of the Library of Congress, former Editor-in-Chief of Book World at the Washington Post, and senior executive in two New York publishing houses, I’m very aware of the extraordinary influence that the original Federal Writers Project (1935-1943) had on this country’s literary history. So many of our most illustrious writers—Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Studs Terkel, Richard Wright, May Swenson, and many others—got their start documenting the Depression for the American Guide Series. One of the most valuable collections of the past century, the Slave Narratives, containing 2,300 first-person accounts of bondage and the families that endured it, was produced as a result. These papers and recordings are all housed at the Library of Congress for the world to see, hear, study, and use. The work has been invaluable. It enriched our country’s cultural currency immeasurably. But it also supported indigent, out-of-work writers in a time of dire need.