Not Subject to Appeal: A Poetic Exploration of Defunded Research

We are recipients of a National Science Foundation (NSF) ADVANCE grant, which was awarded to support our work on faculty service. In early May 2025, we received an early termination notice for the grant. Uncertainty about the grant’s longevity began after the 2024 United States presidential election and was intensified when we received an initial email pausing the grant in late January 2025. To cope with this uncertainty, the first author drew upon her work in poetic inquiry to create found poetry from the email messages we received between January and May of 2025. We present these poems to document a partial history of the recent NSF grant defunding process, and in recognition of the importance and potential impact of political poetry.