Major Capital Campaign Announcement
You may have heard that CAT has received an extraordinary $2.8 million investment from the State of California, the largest state funding we have ever received. We’re excited to announce today what this landmark commitment means for our capital campaign: it puts us beyond our $17 million goal and secures what we need to open the Center to the public in 2027.
We are ecstatic! When we launched this campaign in 2022, $17 million felt audacious. But supporters rallied around our vision more powerfully than we dared to imagine, and we are deeply grateful for the generosity that made this moment possible.
From the beginning, this Center has been about more than a physical space. It’s about creating a welcoming place where people can come together across languages and cultures and find connection in a world that desperately needs it. With funding for our new literary and cultural anchor in San Francisco secured, we can now turn to deepening CAT’s impact by:
- Bringing our powerful Poetry Inside Out education program, which uses translation to inspire more confident learners, to teachers and students across the country.
- Building and diversifying the field and elevating the human-centered art of literary translation at a time of rapid AI growth and depersonalization.
- Expanding our partnership ecosystem to give language and cultural communities a larger stage and build a network that carries the reach of literary translation far beyond our building’s walls.
- Strengthening CAT’s capacity through strategic planning, staff support, leadership development, and DEIB practices.
In the coming months, you’ll see new ways to join us, from memberships and expanded programming to opportunities to advance this work. We look forward to sharing more as these plans take shape, and to celebrating the Center with you in person in 2027.
Thank you for making this bold new era for literature, connection, and cultural understanding possible. We can’t wait to begin this next chapter together, and we couldn’t do it without you!
With heartfelt gratitude,
Michael Holtmann, President, Center for the Art of Translation
Michael Holtmann has worked in the arts for more than 25 years. Prior to joining the Center, he held positions at the National Endowment for the Arts, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, among others. He has served on the board of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) and the international programming committee of the Bay Area Book Festival.
