The choice is clear. Fund the arts. As much as you can. Educate kids, support artists.

Yes, the planet needs rescuing, and people need food and housing and health care. The world needs all that and more. The world also needs the nourishment, refuge, and attention of the arts. Young people who are marginalized—now speaking in their own voices. Writers now telling, and teachers now teaching, the stories of our lives. That’s what helps make democracy a democracy. That’s what NewLit is doing. Thank you for choosing to join with us. Simpsonistas: Tales from New Literary Project. Vol. 7 highlights work from Joyce Carol Oates Prize Winners Jennine Capó Cruce tand and Willy Vlautin, as well as Joyce Carol Oates herself, and a host of distinguished authors connected to NewLit. Represented by their fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, they appear alongside high school–age aspiring writers from free NewLit creative writing workshops. From the Editor’s Preface: “I’ll never forget a certain reading by some of the remarkable teenagers from our workshops, on one of our wildly animated public occasions. Afterward, an emotional father of one of the readers approached and said simply, with the conviction of love, ‘My daughter’s life will never be the same.’ . . . Now ten years down the road, I know one life that will never be the same is my own. I also harbor the hope that, one day, another of those lives will belong to you.”