January 15, 2025

“The grant from the NEA will help us support the continued publication, promotion, and distribution of our artful, whimsical, and ambitious literary journal dedicated to contemporary writing that is both graceful and reckless, at once innovative, intelligent, and moving,” said Michael Dumanis, the journal’s fourth editor, who relaunched the magazine in 2016 after a thirty-year hiatus. “We are grateful for the NEA’s generous funding for our own publication and for the hundreds of other worthy arts projects they support nationwide.” 

Bennington Review is a national biannual print journal of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and film writing that intends to reinforce the value of the bound print journal as an intimate, curated cultural space in which a reader can encounter and experience new work with a degree of immersion not wholly possible through other media. The magazine aims to contribute distinctive style and substance to the national literary conversation through publishing sharp, unexpected, original poetry and prose from a geographically broad and culturally rich spectrum of prominent, up-and-coming, and new voices.

The NEA will award nine grants totaling nearly $175,000 in Vermont and a total of 1,127 Grants for Arts Projects awards and more than $31.8 million nationwide this year.

“The NEA is proud to continue our nearly 60 years of supporting the efforts of organizations and artists that help to shape our country’s vibrant arts sector and communities of all types across our nation,” said NEA Chair Maria Rosario Jackson, PhD. “It is inspiring to see the wide range of creative projects taking place, including Bennington Review.”

Bennington Review was originally founded in 1966 by Laurence J. Hyman, the son of Stanley Edgar Hyman and Shirley Jackson. The first iteration of the magazine focused on publishing work by distinguished faculty and alumni, including Bernard Malamud, Helen Frankenthaler, and Kenneth Burke. It gradually published more work from outside the college community, and the magazine increasingly received national attention. In 1978, Bennington Review was relaunched as a highly visible national journal. Under editors Robert Boyers and later Nicholas Delbanco, Bennington Review became a testing ground for contemporary arts and letters and published work by such established figures as John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Annie Dillard, and John Ashbery and by emerging writers like David Remnick and Louis Menand. Fifty years after its original founding and thirty years after its last issue in 1985, Bennington Review resumed publication. Its thirteenth issue since the most recent relaunch was published in summer 2024. 

Bennington College’s other literary programs include the Literature area of study, the Bennington Writing Seminars MFA program, the Poetry at Bennington reading series, and Silo, the student-run literary magazine at Bennington College. 

For more information on other projects included in the NEA’s grant announcement, visit arts.gov/news.

About Bennington College
Bennington College’s alumni include twelve Pulitzer Prize winners, three U.S. poets laureate, four MacArthur Geniuses, and countless New York Times bestsellers and National Book Award recipients. Recent graduates have gone on to attend PhD and MFA programs in literature and creative writing at Stanford University, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, NYU, UVA, Columbia University, Cornell University, the University of Massachusetts, Arizona State, and Brown University. Graduates have had poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, journalism, and book reviews published or accepted by The Atlantic Wire, The Awl, Boston Review, Christian Science Monitor, Denver Quarterly, The Guardian, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Ploughshares.

Bennington College is a liberal arts college in southwestern Vermont that has distinguished itself as a vanguard institution within American higher education. It was the first to include the visual and performing arts in a liberal arts education. Bennington students work intensively with faculty to forge individual educational paths around their driving questions and interests. It is the only college that requires its students to complete an internship, known as Field Work Term, every year. Rooted in an abiding faith in the talent, imagination, and responsibility of the individual, Bennington invites students to pursue and shape their own intellectual inquiries and, in doing so, to discover the profound interconnection of things. Learn more at bennington.edu.

About the National Endowment for the Arts
Established by Congress in 1965, the National Endowment for the Arts is an independent federal agency that is the largest funder of the arts and arts education in communities nationwide and a catalyst of public and private support for the arts. By advancing opportunities for arts participation and practice, the NEA fosters and sustains an environment in which the arts benefit everyone in the United States. To learn more, visit arts.gov or follow us on Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn and YouTube.