For the past month, Christopher Merrill’s inbox has been flooded with messages from alumni, friends, colleagues, and writers, all voicing their support for the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program after its funding abruptly decreased.

Merrill, who has been the program director for the past 25 years, had received over 2,000 emails alone by March 13 — a week after announcing the program was facing a nearly $1 million cut in funding from the federal government. The emails signified what Merrill described as a “tremendous outpouring of support” for the program from writers and alumni alike.

The support comes after a March 6 announcement from the International Writing Program, also known as the IWP, that the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs terminated grants given to the program for the past 58 years because the financial awards “no longer effectuate agency priorities” nor align “with agency priorities and national interest.”

“I think for all these years, in one way, the IWP has been a sort of beacon of hope for writers from around the world,” Merrill said. “We’ve hosted any number of writers who were at risk in one form or another, usually from oppressive governments. And that notion of this being a place where writers could have three months of safe haven and to be in conversation with writers from 30 other countries, that’s just been dashed with one email.”

The loss in funding means a loss of services the program was previously able to provide. Consequently, the program announced it will have to have a smaller fall resident international writer cohort, cancel its summer youth program, dissolve its distance learning courses, and discontinue the Emerging Voices Mentorship Program.

The IWP’s goal is to bring international writers together to create mutual understanding between different cultures, Merrill said. While the funding cuts will not result in the IWP shutting down, the program’s ability to accomplish this goal has now been strained.

“I found that in the conversations we have here on an hourly basis with these really distinguished writers from around the world, it’s endlessly opening up my vision and my sense of possibility as a writer, as a thinker, and that’s what we have been bringing to the Iowa City community for these now 58 years that the State Department piece of it has just effectively ended, which is, for us, devastating news and and a little bizarre,” Merrill said.

Merrill said the program brings together writers from places that would not or could not interact previously, such as Palestinian and Israeli writers being in residence simultaneously.

“We often have writers coming from countries at odds with one another. And here they find out, well, actually, we have much more in common than divides us, and political differences may never be resolved, but knowing that more unites us than divides us is a worthy thing to keep finding ways to cultivate,” Merrill said.

The loss of funding is also an indicator, he said, of the U.S. and State Department’s movement away from cultural diplomacy and trying to understand other cultures, which is what the IWP strives to achieve.

“We’ve hosted 1,625 writers from 160 plus countries, and so that means we have a sense of what’s going on in really global terms, and they’ve just turned their back on that now, which is pretty dismaying,” Merrill said.

Beyond the financially devastating loss of funding, Merrill said the cuts mean the program no longer has access to resources from the U.S. Secretary of State connecting international writers with the IWP through embassies and consulates.

RELATED: UI International Writing Program cuts services after grants are terminated by federal government

“We’ve lost that whole mechanism of being in contact with people who really know what’s happening in a given place. So, as we try to reinvent the IWP with a different funding model, we also will have to reinvent that whole network of connections that every year would yield several writers we would never have known anything about who were incredibly interesting,” Merrill said.

The IWP’s longterm impact reaches more than just international writers. It extends in shaping Iowa City’s literary scene, including being a driving force behind Iowa City becoming a UNESCO City of Literature.

“We were the ones who spearheaded that campaign,” Merrill said. “We became the first UNESCO City of Literature in the New World, and now we were the first grants terminated by the Trump regime.”

IWP sees support from UI programs, departments

The messages of support Merrill has received go beyond just alumni emails. Other university programs and departments are also defending the importance of the IWP, including the Writers’ Workshop.

Lan Samantha Chang, director of the Writers’ Workshop, wrote in an email to The Daily Iowan that the IWP has brought guests who have enriched the creative community on the UI campus.

“Inspiring students through an exchange of ideas and cultures, broadening writers’ sense of the literature that exists outside of U.S. borders, setting an example of how artists are able to exist and flourish in a variety of political and social circumstances,” Chang wrote. “It is because of the International Writing Program that many people around the world have heard about and learned to appreciate the University of Iowa.”

Loren Glass, the chair of the UI English Department, also said the IWP is essential in connecting Iowa to the world and vice versa.

“Obviously there’s lots of people who just come for a few months, but there’s been many people [who] come back, or who’ve even stayed here for various periods of time or stayed connected to Iowa,” Glass said. “It’s enormously enriched the literary and more broadly cultural environment of Iowa, and it’s enormously enhanced Iowa’s literary reputation around the world.”

The English Department, in which the IWP initially began, has provided continuous support to the international program as a whole since the funding cut was announced, whether it be orally or by attending readings and events Merrill is organizing.

“[Merrill] is not taking this lying down,” Glass said. “He’s really organizing. And so a lot of our faculty have been sort of galvanized, or at least uplifted, by the sort of energy and grit that he’s putting into this. He’s not accepting it as the end of the IWP. He’s determined to rebuild it and make sure it survives.”

The IWP has seen donations come in from different groups and has support from the university, Merrill said. He added that while the IWP will not have the levels of diversity it has had in the past and will have to be strategic for the next few years while creating a new funding model, the support indicates the program is a place of importance to people across the world.

“We’re going to fight to put something together that will honor the founders’ vision of the IWP as a place where writers from diverse countries and backgrounds and ideologies and economic status connect, do some good work, go home with a bigger vision of what’s possible as a writer,” Merrill said.