IT’S A DREAM: An Interview with Literary Cleveland’s Matt Weinkam
If you don’t already know Literary Cleveland, we don’t know what to tell you. If you do know Literary Cleveland, you likely also know, or at least know of, the local literary nonprofit’s indefatigable Executive Director, Matt Weinkam. We always love talking with Matt about what it’s like helming one of our city’s eminent vehicles of public literary programming—as we did in an early episode of Index for Continuance with both Matt and Lit Cle’s Programming Director, Michelle Smith—because we just can’t get enough of the nuts and bolts, apparently.
But life is long, and literature even longer, and given all that’s happened between now and the last time we talked, including recent federal funding cuts to arts orgs across the country you might have heard about, and, you know, everything else, we thought a little check-in with Matt might be in order. Luckily Joey Rooney was available to ask some smart questions. What follows is an interview Joey conducted with Matt about the current state of literary programs and creative dreams in our fair city, what makes Cleveland such special place for letters (actually wait, never mind, nothing does, please don’t move here), and what to make of that whole perpetual crisis in the humanities thing.
Joey Rooney: What does a day in the life of the director of Literary Cleveland look like? What do you have on your plate at the moment?
Matt Weinkam: At a small nonprofit everyone does everything. My job is a balance of programming and development so it’s creating opportunities and finding the funding that makes those opportunities possible.
For instance, here’s some of what I did the last seven days (with lots of help):
Ran our Cleveland Poetry Festival with 46 hours of events including a daylong poetry crawl to 8 locations all featuring 66 poets, and over 500 in total attendance
Held a meeting to design our Inkubator conference in September
Secured visiting authors for future Plum City readings
Planned our board retreat later this month
Made progress on our fundraiser event in June
Worked with a consultant to improve our process for hiring and training instructors
Send emails laying groundwork for a super-secret statewide program set for 2026
Met the senior Arts and Culture strategist in the mayor’s office
Strategized for how to survive cuts to federal arts funding
Revised a grant application and a grant report
Scheduled a meeting with a key donor
Plus all the usual day-to-day work of managing staff, issuing payroll, reviewing marketing, overseeing programs, and answering—let me check—80 emails
That’s a relatively tame week.
It’s a lot of work and can be stressful and exhausting at times, but the truth is I would do the programming work for free and I’ve enjoyed learning how to manage and grow a nonprofit. Honestly, I can’t believe I get paid to do this work. It’s a dream.
JR: Literary Cleveland’s Inkubator Writing Conference is one of the largest free writing conferences in the country. What does this conference mean to Northeast Ohio? And what does Northeast Ohio mean to Lit Cleveland? Also, care to share a preview of the upcoming 2025 conference?
MW: Some folks may not know but the Inkubator Writing Conference is how Literary Cleveland got started. Back in 2015, a group of writers got together, planned this free conference at the downtown Cleveland Public Library, and hoped maybe 50 people would show up. Instead 300 did. Out of that first event our nonprofit was born.
Ten years later the conference has grown into a $125,000 program with 50 events over 8 days totaling 82 hours or programs with 88 presenters and more than 3,000 in attendance—all free. To our knowledge there is nothing else like it in the country.
In this way the conference does a bunch of things for Northeast Ohio. It’s planned collaboratively with partners throughout the literary community and it brings together libraries, bookstores, presses, journals, nonprofits, authors, and readers so we can connect and bond and concoct wild new ideas and programs (hence the misspelled incubator name). It removes barriers to access and provides easy on ramps for new writers to step into community, gain skills, advance their career and find their people making this region a springboard for emerging talent. It spotlights incredible local and regional authors giving them a platform and helping them reach new audiences. It fosters dialogue around important topics—last year we talked book bans, black masculinity, trans writing, Gaza, and writers seeking asylum. And it helps put Cleveland on the map nationally. Each year we expand our reach and bring in more writers from out of town (30 of our presenters were from outside Cleveland in 2024 and 31% of participants were from outside of Ohio). That’s huge. We want to make Cleveland a literary capital in the Midwest and the conference is key to that ambition.
And the thing is, Cleveland is the perfect place for this. All the reasons people might dismiss our city or region are secretly strengths that we can leverage. We’re not a big costal city—but we’re centrally located on a Great Lake for easy travel and access. We’re a lower income Rust Belt town—but that makes it more affordable, more authentic and down to earth, more accessible. We’re in an increasingly red state—that means this programming is more vital and urgent for the people who live here. We’re often overlooked—which means we have an opportunity introduce people to what makes Greater Cleveland great: stellar indie bookstores, two of the best libraries in the country, world-class arts institutions, a literary legacy that stretches from Langston Hughes to Toni Morrison to Mary Oliver, that weird giant FREE stamp downtown—I could go on.
We’re expanding our scope and reach and ambition at Literary Cleveland, but we will always be from and for Cleveland.
JR: Has Literary Cleveland felt the impact of recent government cuts to humanities funding? If so, how is the organization handling this sad new economic reality, and what—if anything—can we in the Cleveland creative scene do about it?
MW: Yes, we’re already feeling the effects of cuts in 2025.
Most directly, we’ve lost $25,000 we typically receive from Ohio Humanities (because of National Endowment for the Humanities cuts) and the National Endowment for the Arts for our Inkubator Conference. The good news is we have moved quickly to find other funding options and have a supportive community that has stepped up with donations (support our fundraiser!). I’m confident we’ll close that gap and have a successful year.
But it’s not 2025 that I’m worried about, it’s what’s coming next. Federal cuts may lead to state cuts, private funders may shift their attention to more urgent needs, and many think we’re headed towards a recession which will lead to fewer donations and program registrations. It’s hard for small nonprofits to survive that many hits.
As bad as that future seems, for some of our partners the emergency is already here. Libraries have had federal IMLS grants disappear and battling attempts to reduce funding in the Ohio statehouse. Universities are battling funding cuts and laws that eliminate academic freedoms. Public school funding is on the chopping block. Nonprofit publishers are in crisis from loss of funding. Books are being banned or burned.
It is important for us to move from talking about these as separate crises to helping people understand they represent a coordinated attack on art and free speech, on critical thinking and education, on any forms of resistance to authoritarian rule. The best thing for the creative community to do right now is help tell this larger story.
JR: On a more uplifting note: What do you regard as Literary Cleveland’s greatest success story during your time as director?
MW: You’re backing me into a corner here. What is our greatest success?
Is it helping launch the careers of individual writers? We’ve been very fortunate lately that many of our folks have found traditional success. One of our first Breakthrough Writing Residents, Sonia Feldman, landed an agent and sold her book to Penguin Random House. In five years, Stephanie Ginese went from attending a free poetry workshop of ours at the library to winning the Cleveland Arts Prize for poetry (and now teaching that free poetry workshop at the library). There are many more examples.
Is it amplifying the stories of people that are unheard or ignored or oppressed? I think about what RA Washington has done in partnership with LMM 2100 Lakeside Men’s Shelter in publishing the writing of unhoused Clevelanders as part of his Amplify Fellowship. I think about Dr. T’s Black Women Coping in Cleveland anthology from 2021. I’m most proud of our Voices from the Edge program from 2021 in which we paid essential workers to write about their experiences on the front lines of the pandemic and published their writing in an online anthology. I carry many of those stories and poems with me still today.
Maybe it is simply creating the abundance of opportunities. A decade ago none of this existed. There were limited classes or workshops options, no intensives or fellowships or residencies, no journal or anthologies, no Inkubator Conference, no Literary Cleveland. Now we have 1,300 hours of programs for more than 6,000 people. We partner with and support several dozen groups and institutions. The are few if any organizations doing as much as we are between Chicago and New York. The true impact is difficult to measure; you never know what poem, what reading, what event will change someone’s life. Maybe our greatest success story is seeing how much people create, how much they accomplish, how much they change through our programs.
JR: You’ve taught creative writing as far away as Sun Yat-sen University in Zhuhai, China. What was that experience like? To what extent is creative writing a kind of universal language, and to what extent is it a way into a specific culture or milieu?
MW: Great question. Back in 2011, I helped develop a creative writing class for upper-level English majors at Sun Yat-sen as a way to both refine their language fluency and enable creative expression. We analyzed short stories and had them craft their own, which, as you might guess, is way more fun than completing workbooks or writing bland essays.
On the one hand, this was a triumph. Our class discussions were far more real and honest when they were about fiction, and each person’s story revealed something about who they were as unique individuals in a way that no other lesson had. There was real cross cultural revelation and bonding.
On the other hand, I look back now and see how naïve I was as a teacher. I had no background in Chinese storytelling traditions or how they differ from, say, Western plot conventions. When I edited their stories, I thought I was improving them when instead I was likely just bending them to my American sensibilities. I worry now that I was performing a kind of narrative colonialism, that I was unconsciously fulfilling the soft power goals of the United States as articulated in Eric Bennett’s book Workshops of Empire. But perhaps I’m overstating what was likely just a fun exercise.
In any case, I look back now and see how much of a missed opportunity this was. We could have had a real dialogue about how narrative expectations are culturally defined. We could have unpacked how American and Chinese narrative expectations overlap and how they differ. We could have experimented with telling the same story for two different audiences and asked what that reveals about culture and narrative and language. Perhaps one day I can go back and try again.
JR: You’re a founding editor of Threadcount Magazine, and you also helped create Gordon Square Review. What goes into these foundational efforts, and what sustains literary journals and magazines beyond the initial honeymoon phase in which everything is new and exciting?
MW: I’ve learned there are so many reasons to start a literary journal and they can serve so many purposes and some last and some don’t and who cares it’s all great.
GSR was created very deliberately by Literary Cleveland to be an engine of opportunity for local writers. When Laura Walter, Ali Black, and I worked it out (Lee Chilcote hired us) we made conscious decisions about what would make it most useful to our community. It spotlights great Northeast Ohio authors alongside work from all over as a way to bridge local and national literary communities. Editorial mentorships give first time writers an opportunity to publish their work. The editor and volunteer reader positions help writers build experience and careers. And because the journal is part of a larger nonprofit, we have funding and support to ensure it can keep going after individual editors move on. In this way it is always being reinvented and will hopefully keep making an impact for a long time.
Threadcount on the other had was a lark. A group of us friends started it after grad school for fun to publish writing that existed in that grey area between flash fiction and prose poetry. Over time we honed our aesthetic and attracted other writers with similarly weird sensibilities (I can’t explain why years later I still love “The Face of Things” by Joanna Ruocco so much). If just a small handful of people read or cared about it, that was okay. Ideal, actually. It wasn’t meant to have a larger purpose or audience. Niche was the point. Over time each of us editors got busy to the point where we had to close it down, but we didn’t see that as a failure so much as a resolution. It had served its purpose for us. And if nothing else the archive is still up online featuring an incredible list of authors and their bizarre writing.
Both kinds of journals are necessary! All kinds are needed! It’s all part of the evolutionary process of literature. The more diversity the better, and what lasts lasts. I say don’t overthink it. Just because sharks still exist and dinosaurs don’t doesn’t mean they aren’t both awesome.
JR: Do you have any personal writing projects coming down the pike? Feel free to advertise any upcoming publications, readings, conference presentations, etc.
MW: I recently shared a new short story on the Radio Free Cleveland podcast that you can check out. Then next up I’m leading a panel at the NonfictioNOW conference in June called “Polyvocality: Collective Writing Experiments” with Cincinnati poet laureate Yalie Saweda Kamara, David Hassler from Wick Poetry Center, and Ander Monson of Essay Daily and DIAGRAM. After that I’ll be swept up planning our Inkubator Conference plus a secret new statewide program we’re planning for 2026 (fingers crossed). More to come soon!
Matt Weinkam is a writer, editor, instructor, and the executive director of Literary Cleveland. His work has been published in Denver Quarterly, Sonora Review, New South, DIAGRAM, and Electric Literature.
Joey Rooney is a writer primarily of fiction, but also of poetry and creative nonfiction, and a graduate of the NEOMFA Program. Born and raised on the west side of Cleveland, he received his MA in English from Case Western Reserve University and his MA in Theology and Religious Studies from John Carroll University.