The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has announced the thirty-seven recipients of its 2016 Creative Writing Fellowships in prose. Each of the fellows will receive twenty-five thousand dollars for writing, research, travel, and general career advancement.
This year’s recipients are:
Elisabeth Tova Bailey
Dean Bakopoulos
Bill Cheng
Diane Cook
Lucy Corin
Michael Croley
Meghan Daum
Peter Ho Davies
Jack Driscoll
Jerry Gabriel
Kaitlyn Greenidge
Rav Grewal-Kök
Paul Harding
Jamey Hatley
Kevin Haworth
Nellie Hermann
Vedran Husić
Laleh Khadivi
R. O. Kwon
Joy Ladin
Éireann Lorsung
Anthony Marra
Monica McFawn
David Philip Mullins
Lenore Myka
Dina Nayeri
Celeste Ng
Téa Obreht
Mehdi Tavana Okasi
Leslie Parry
Joseph Rathgeber
Amy Rowland
Alison Stine
Aaron Thier
Samrat Upadhyay
Melissa Yancy
Mario Alberto Zambrano
The annual grants are given to emerging and established writers and alternate between poetry and prose.
“Since its inception, the creative writing fellowship program has awarded more than forty-five million dollars to a diverse group of more than three thousand writers, many of them emerging writers at the start of their careers,” said Amy Stolls, the NEA’s director of literature programs. “These thirty-seven extraordinary new fellows provide more evidence of the NEA’s track record of discovering and supporting excellent writers.”
A group of twenty-three readers and panelists chose the recipients from 1,763 applications. The 2017 fellowships will be given in poetry; the application deadline is March 9.