Not long after the National Endowment for the Arts canceled a $25,000 grant to his organization, Ilan Stavans, founder of Massachusetts-based nonprofit publisher Restless Books, began to worry about the future of its annual writing prize. That’s when he got a call from Steven Kellman, a comparative literature professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio and longtime Restless board member, saying he knew someone who could help.

“I said, do I know that somebody too?” Stavans recalls. “And Steve said, ‘It’s me.’ ”

The Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing will enter its 10th year of honoring “outstanding debut literary works by first-generation immigrants” under a new name, the Kellman Prize for Immigrant Literature. Kellman’s unprecedented donation of $300,000 to Restless both guarantees the continuation of the prize in perpetuity and offers a beacon of hope in an otherwise murky landscape for independent publishing in the U.S. Since May, 51 independent presses and literary organizations have lost a total of $1.2 million in federal funding as the Trump administration redefines its priorities in the arts. In August, the NEA left writers in the lurch too, when it suddenly canceled its 2026 Creative Writing Fellowship program.

The chilling effect hovers over not just the literary industry but also the world that literature reflects. “It’s a war on foreignness that we’re experiencing right now,” says Stavans, whose organization’s mission—to “support the publication and promotion of international literature”—was deemed out of alignment with Trump administration priorities.

“Restless Books is all about opening up literature to the world,” Kellman says. “It seems to me that immigrant writing does that more dramatically than most other forms.”

The revitalization of Restless’s flagship prize arrives as Immigration and Customs Enforcement crackdowns shake long-standing narratives positioning America as a nation of immigrants. In May, federal officials announced that ICE would aim to meet a quota of 3,000 arrests daily, triggering widespread fear among immigrant communities. Masked federal agents have conducted regular raids, sometimes without warrants, and prisons have struggled to keep up with increasing numbers of detainees.

“This prize, and the writing that these people are doing, is a rebuttal of the way immigrants are demonized,” Kellman says. As a professor of translingual literature whose four grandparents immigrated to the United States from Eastern Europe, he believes the prize offers an important reminder of the centrality of immigrants to a national, and international, story—and the need for these stories to be written and read, especially now.

“If you want to take up the old cliché that life is a journey, which it is in a way, we’re all migrants through our lives,” Kellman says. “So immigrant literature is maybe a synecdoche of the entire enterprise of being human.”

The prize is international in scope, and has launched the careers of such writers as Grace Talusan (The Body Papers, 2019) and Deepak Unnikrishnan (Temporary People, 2017), whose works tell the stories of a young Filipina woman adjusting to life in a New England suburb and migrant workers in the United Arab Emirates, respectively. Past prize winners’ books have also been recognized by the Center for Fiction and PEN America, among other organizations.

“The prize put me on the map as a writer willing to take risks,” says Unnikrishnan, whose manuscript had previously been rejected by almost two dozen publishing houses. Talusan, who says that for years she confronted “incorrect narratives” assumed of her experiences as a formerly undocumented immigrant, childhood sexual abuse survivor, and a Filipino person, is grateful to have found in Restless a publisher that “understood the importance of telling my own story.”

The recipient of this year’s prize will be announced in November. The winner will be awarded $10,000, a writing residency, and publication with Restless, which has seen an uptick in sales in immigrant literature as readers oppose “letting the president and the regime set the tone of what we read or don’t read,” according to Stavans.

Both Stavans and Kellman believe the moment presents an opportunity for independent publishers to put out a diversity of daring and courageous works and encourage readers to reimagine what it means to be an immigrant. And they are optimistic about the stories to come. If, says Kellman, with a nod to the poet Richard Wilbur, “the pearl comes from irritating the oyster, in a way, we’re fortunate to be living in irritating times.”