I remember the first time I was part of the Utah Humanities Book Festival. It was 2015, and my first book — “Beyond the Grip of Craniosynostosis” — had just been published. I’d never thought that day would come, and I never thought that I would be able to hold up a book festival program and see my name printed on it as a highlighted writer in Weber County. I held it up. I held it up high. I kept copies. Utah Humanities even paid me to talk and read in my hometown of Ogden.
And here’s the kicker: I was only one of hundreds of writers highlighted by Utah Humanities. To be given a microphone and the chance to connect with an audience made me feel so cool.
“I don’t need money for this,” I remember saying.
“We pay everyone — because it’s important,” Michale McLane, previous manager of the book festival, told me.
They paid authors across the state, in rural counties and in Salt Lake City, to share their work and talk about why literature and writing are important. In my case, I got to share about craniosynostosis, a congenital birth defect that was the subject of my book. Other authors shared work about so many different topics.
Books aren’t just about stories. They are vehicles to deliver important discussions about every topic in the world, and the authors are their drivers.
Utah Humanities has created, organized and successfully run this book festival for more than a quarter of a century, one of the longest running festivals in the country — it’s a festival that covers every region of the state of Utah throughout October, but this is only one of many programs that Utah Humanities curates throughout the state to give everyone an opportunity to learn, to have a voice, to see Smithsonian art, to get an education they might not otherwise have access to, to have community conversations that improve understanding, and to access funds that enable them to create community projects on their own.
DOGE has just cut all of this, not only in Utah but across the country — and they did it in the slimiest of ways. An email went out to all councils in the middle of the night on April 2 cancelling all Congress-funded and approved funds for 2025. The email was sent from a non-NEH email and signed by the acting director of the National Endowment for the Humanities, but it did not come from his email. Shady. Shady. Shady.
The email said all funding had been cut because humanities councils did not fulfill their contracts but in no way said how — in its brevity — they did not fulfill their obligations. It also said that the Utah Humanities Council no longer aligned with NEH’s goals.
Even more frustrating: Each U.S. state and territory grant from NEH is just over $1 million — half the amount Elon Musk spent on checks to two voters in Wisconsin. According to the New York Times, this funding will be redirected to build a statue garden.
It’s clear to me that this is not about the money. It’s an anti-intellectual, propagandist and ideological gutting of programs that ask people to use critical thinking to improve their communities. And this is a clear pattern: We’ve seen this administration take aim at the African-American History Museum at the Smithsonian; we’ve seen the Enola Gay cut from official websites, seemingly because of the word “gay;” we’ve seen diversity, equity and inclusion words scrubbed from government websites.
The loss of NEH funding to Utah Humanities will kill our beloved Utah Humanities Book Festival that has been alive and supporting local authors, libraries and independent bookstores for 27 years. By killing the book festival, DOGE has killed the voices who drive conversation by cutting them off from those who want to have the conversation. By defunding Utah Humanities, DOGE strips local community organizers of the opportunity to apply for humanities grants in their community, wipes out the long-standing Museum on Main Street Program that brings Smithsonian Art to rural Utah communities and vacates opportunities for students to go to college who could not without assistance.
It’s not about the money. It’s an assault on our humanity by killing the humanities.
(Kase Johnstun) Kase Johnstun lives and writes in Ogden with his family.
Kase Johnstun lives and writes in Ogden with his family. He is the author of two award-winning novels — “Let the Wild Grasses Grow” and “Cast Away,” Torrey House Press — and an award-winning memoir “Beyond the Grip of Craniosynostosis,” McFarland.
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