Literature Fellowships represent the National Endowment for the Arts' most direct investment in American creativity. The goal of the fellowships program is to encourage the production of new work and allow writers the time and means to write. During the past 40 years, the Endowment has awarded over $41 million to over 2,700 writers, and sponsored work resulting in over 2,400 books, including many of the most acclaimed novels of contemporary American literature: Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex, Oscar Hijuelos's The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Alice Walker's The Color Purple, William Kennedy's Ironweed, and Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country. Since, 1990, 61 of the 99 recipients of the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and Fiction were previous NEA Literature Fellows. All but five received NEA Literature Fellowships before any major national award, usually at least a decade earlier. We invite you to peruse a sampling of our recent fellows here at the Writers' Corner.
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Sample work by recipients
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