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David Kipen is pretty sure the idea for a modern-day Federal Writers Project came to him at dawn.
It was early in the devastating spring of 2020 and the former literature director of the National Endowment for the Arts
was thinking of his friends who’d died of COVID-19, a handful of the more than 578,000 people killed by the virus in the United States to date. He was thinking of his brilliant creative writing students at UCLA, deprived of internships and jobs. Of decimated small-town newspapers and fellow writers who’d been laid off. And he was thinking of the cosmic rifts dividing the nation.