The National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships (1965-2024)

Abstract

This dataset contains a comprehensive list of the writers sponsored by NEA fellowships from the organization’s founding in 1965 to 2024, including information about those writers’ demographics, education, and geography.

Principal Investigator: Alexander Manshel
Research Assistants: Alexandra Colby, Nived Dharmaraj, Emaline Gonzalez Thomas, Xujia Guan, Adam Hill, Nicole Huang, Richard Joseph, Matthew Molinaro, Jordan Pruett, Jaede Shillingford

 

This dataset contains a comprehensive list of the writers sponsored by National Endowment for the Arts fellowships from the organization’s founding in 1965 to 2024, including information about those writers’ demographics, education, and geography.

Data Table

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Data Visualization and Exploration

// https://observablehq.com/d/75d37bad8cc92862
import {viewof groupByColumn, viewof topX, fetchData, viewof neaGrantYearRange, filtered_data, line_chart, bar_chart} from "75d37bad8cc92862"

table_data = fetchData(
  "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Post45-Data-Collective/data/refs/heads/main/Post45_NEAData_Final.csv"
)


// Select specific columns
filtered_data = table_data.map(d => ({
  full_name_firstlast: d.full_name_firstlast,
  given_name_middle: d.given_name_middle,
  family_name: d.family_name,
  gender: d.gender,
  race_ethnicity: d.race_ethnicity,
  //birth_year: d.birth_year,
  country: d.country,
  us_state: d.us_state,
  hometown: d.hometown,
  ba: d.ba,
  //ba2: d.ba2,
  ma: d.ma,
  ma2: d.ma2,
  phd: d.phd,
  mfa: d.mfa,
  //mfa2: d.mfa2
}));

Explore NEA Fellowships by Category

viewof groupByColumn

viewof topX

bar_chart

Explore NEA Fellowships by Year

line_chart

viewof neaGrantYearRange

Significance and Context

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has been the main channel for the public sponsorship of American writers since its formation in 1965. In the years since then, the NEA has awarded more than 3700 Creative Writing Fellowships to fund writers in the United States.

Collection and Creation

The list of fellows was web-scraped from publicly accessible NEA records, and then cross-referenced (for accuracy) with “NEA Literature Fellowships: 40 Years of Supporting American Writers,” which also includes geographic information about the writers sponsored from 1966 to 2006. Additional demographic and educational information was then gathered by the research team using a range of sources, including author biographies and websites, institutional websites, interviews, encyclopedias, literary criticism, and literary journalism.

Along with information on each writer’s education, the research team worked to gather information on how they identify in terms of gender, race, and ethnicity. As So (2020) writes in Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction, “traditional statistical methods have often historically meant the quantification of one’s objects of study and the reification of race. Such labeling works against the aims of critical race studies, which takes as its very mission the deconstruction of racial categories.” While this project’s research team is committed to constructivist theories of racialization, we are also committed to documenting forms of inequality in the literary field. Given that the NEA fellowships are federally funded, the fact that only 15 percent of all grantees between 1966 and 2024 identify as Black, Asian American, Latinx, or Indigenous is significant and troubling. The inclusion of information about race and ethnicity in this dataset is intended to help identify such inequities.

Each writer was researched by no fewer than two members of the research team, each working independently. When discrepancies arose between the findings of the initial researchers, an additional member (or members) of the research team worked to reconcile the data by corroborating the existing research notes with additional sources. Nevertheless, there were writers for whom some information was not possible to ascertain. The hope is that this dataset will continue to be improved by future researchers. To that end, please report any errors, corrections, or additions (including relevant citations) to Alexander Manshel (alexander.manshel@mcgill.ca). The dataset will be updated regularly with any necessary amendments.

Funding

This dataset was made possible by generous grants from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Société et Culture (FRQSC), and the Post45 Data Collective.

Description

• full_name_lastfirst: full name as listed in NEA records; in some cases, pen names are appended: e.g., “Creech, Wayne Jr. (Morri),” “Freeman (Makkai), Rebecca”
  
• full_name_firstlast: full name as listed in NEA records; in some cases, pen names are appended: e.g., “Wayne (Morri) Creech Jr.,” “Rebecca Freeman (Makkai)”
  
• given_name_middle: first/given name; includes middle name, if used
  
• family_name: last/family name
  
• nea_grant_year: the year of the NEA Creative Writing Fellowship
  
• other_nea_grant: the year of any other NEA Creative Writing Fellowships received by the same author, separated by commas
  
• hometown: the town or city of residence as listed by the NEA; a value of “No city listed” indicates that no such information was provided by the NEA.
  
• home_state_country: the US state or country residence as listed by the NEA; a value of “No state or country listed” indicates that no such information was provided by the NEA.
  
• birth_year: the writer’s year of birth or blank (if no such information could be identified); see further details below
  
• gender: the gender of the writer, based on how the writer identifies in interviews, author biographies, institutional profile pages, or (in the case that these sources are not available) pronouns used in sources at the time of research; values are “male,” “female,” “nonbinary,” “female / nonbinary,” “queer,” “plural,” and “unknown”; see further details below
  
• race_ethnicity: the race and/or ethnicity of the writer, based on how the writer identifies in interviews, author biographies, institutional profile pages, or (in the case that these sources are not available) how the writer is described by scholars and/or literary journalists; given the wide range of self-identifications, there are over 90 unique values for this field; see further details below
  
• ba: the institution from which the writer received their bachelor’s degree (including BA, BEd, BSc, etc.); a blank field signifies that the writer did not attain a bachelor’s degree or the research team was unable to identify any such information; see further details below
  
• ba2: if the writer attained a second bachelor’s degree, or attended a second institution en route to the bachelor’s degree, that institution is listed here; a blank field signifies that the research team was unable to identify any such information
  
• ma: the institution from which the writer received their master’s degree (including MA, MBA, MS, etc.), excluding MFA degrees and MA degrees in the field of creative writing; a blank field signifies that the writer did not attain a master’s degree or the research team was unable to identify any such information; see further details below
  
• ma2: if the writer attained a second master’s degree, or attended a second institution en route to the master’s degree, that institution is listed here; a blank field signifies that the research team was unable to identify any such information
  
• phd: the institution from which the writer received their doctoral degree (including PhD, DFA, or JD); a blank field signifies that the writer did not attain a doctoral degree or the research team was unable to identify any such information; see further details below
  
• mfa: the institution from which the writer received their MFA degree or MA degree in the field of creative writing; while Stanford University’s Wallace Stegner Fellowship is not a degree-granting program, writers who received a Stegner Fellowship will be listed here (or in the mfa2 field) as “Stanford”; a blank field signifies that the writer did not attain a MFA degree, MA in creative writing, or Stegner Fellowship, or that the research team was unable to identify any such information; see further details below
  
• mfa2: if the writer attained a second MFA or MA in creative writing, or received a Stegner Fellowship after their first MFA or MA in creative writing, that institution is listed here; a blank field signifies that the research team was unable to identity any such information
  
• post45_hathi_entry: values are either “Yes,” which indicates that one or more entries for the writer were identified in the Post45 “HathiTrust Fiction” dataset, or blank, which indicates that no such entry was identified
  
• nea_person_id: unique numeric identifier for each writer; in rare cases, multiple fellowships under different names are resolved: e.g., “2559—Chapman, Leslie—NEA 1970” and “2559—Silko, Leslie Marmon—NEA 1974”
  

Ethical Considerations

A Note on Sensitive Information

All of the information in this dataset is publicly available. Nevertheless, information about any individual writer’s year of birth, gender identity, race, ethnicity, or education is sensitive. This data is provided here only to enable the study of broad patterns throughout the history of the NEA Creative Writing Fellowships and not intended as definitive. Requests to correct, amend, or remove any such sensitive information will be honored. Please contact Alexander Manshel (alexander.manshel@mcgill.ca) with any questions or concerns.

More than 240 NEA fellowships have been awarded to writers who have publicly identified themselves as “white” or “a white writer,” and are listed here as such. That said, nearly 2900 fellowships (over 78 percent of all fellowships in the dataset) are listed as “uniden,” or unidentifying, in the field corresponding to race and ethnicity. Many of these writers likely identified or identify as white, but the research team was nevertheless unable to find a source to corroborate that active identification. This is unsurprising given how whiteness often goes unmarked. As Morrison (1993) writes in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination about one of Ernest Hemingway’s characters, “we know [he] is white, and we know he is because nobody says so.” Despite this, writers in this dataset are listed alternatively as “white” or “uniden” in order to avoid presuming or projecting whiteness onto individual writers. Given that many writers refer to themselves as “Irish American” or “German American,” for example, without explicitly identifying as white, the dataset lists them here as “uniden / irisham” or “uniden / germanam.”

The 94 unique values for the field of “race_ethnicity” include: “afam” (African American); “arabam” (Arab American); “asianam” (Asian American); “black / caribam” (Black or Caribbean American); “indigenous,” “latinx,” “mixedrace,” “uniden,” “uniden / jewish,” “white,” “white / jewish.” In the case that writers identify in multiple ways, those multiple identifications are listed here separated by slashes: e.g., “asianam / southasian,” “indigenous / latinx,” “uniden / germanam / jewish.”

References

Morrison, Toni. 1993. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Reprint edition. New York: Vintage.

So, Richard Jean. 2020. Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction. Columbia University Press.