Culture Chronicle

NEA Dims Lights on Big Read
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - August 1, 2010
By Bob Hoover

For a national reading program, $1 million isn't a lot of money, but that's all the National Endowment for the Arts will spend this year on its once highly hyped Big Read. It's a 73 percent reduction.

The current NEA bosses have cut $2.7 million and 193 participants from the shiny jewel of the former Dana Gioia regime, a devastating rejection of a federal initiative that Mr. Gioia once suggested reversed the country's decline in reading.

Appointed by President George Bush in 2002, the occasional poet, opera lover and General Foods marketing executive focused on the literary arts, particularly after an NEA study, "Reading at Risk," determined that Americans were falling away from novels, plays and poetry.

The NEA determined that there was a 10 percent drop in adults reading those genres between 1982 and 2002. The biggest decline was charted among the 18-24 set -- 28 percent. For the full article, click here