How the NEA Literature Fellowship Process Works Today

Writers who meet the Endowment's eligibility requirements may apply by filling out a form (available on the NEA Web site: www.arts.gov) and sending in a sample of their best work. In a year when prose is reviewed, applicants submit 30 pages of fiction or creative nonfiction; in the alternate year for poetry, they submit 10 pages of poems (translation is a separate category with different requirements). To facilitate the process of blind judging, our staff assigns a tracking number to each anonymous manuscript, copies of which are then sent to a panel of distinguished American writers who spend five months evaluating them.

To ease the workload (and entice panelists to serve), we split the panel into teams, each of which receives a portion of the total number of manuscripts (which came in just under 1,600 in FY 2005). Each team picks its favorites, thus creating a pool of manuscripts to be discussed at a meeting all panelists will attend in Washington, DC. Every chosen manuscript is read, discussed, and scored by a subset of judges (panelists include a layperson, who acts as a representative of the public and is not in the business of writing books but is an avid reader and knowledgeable on the genre of the manuscripts being reviewed). At this point, any panelist who is in conflict with a manuscript is removed from the subset of reviewers.

Manuscripts are ultimately rank-ordered according to their combined scores. The full panel looks at the ranked list and makes its final recommendations, which then go through two more levels of review: the presidentially appointed and Senate-confirmed National Council on the Arts and the NEA Chairman. Fellows are announced to the public at the end of each year. They may use their grant as they wish, as long as it relates to their writing. They will send us a progress report during the grant period and a final report at the end, usually outlining publishing achievements and speaking engagements.

In this ever-changing world, there are always timely issues that demand attention. What exactly is creative nonfiction? Should certain self-published work be eligible? Should we accept manuscripts in other languages? How do graphic novels or blogs or performance poems fit into the picture? At the end of every panel meeting, the Endowment holds a public policy session in which panelists (who are sometimes former NEA Fellows themselves) raise these sorts of questions and offer suggestions. This, in fact, is how the Endowment arrived at a system that works: by listening to the advice of those over the years who sailed, stumbled, or slogged through it all.

Initial Goal of the Program in 1967

To help all writers, but in particular those writers who were - to use a modern term - underserved, such as:

• Non-teaching writers;

• Women with domestic responsibilities and dependent children;

• Talented writers from disadvantaged backgrounds, including urban ghettos;

• Young writers who do not yet have the kind of established reputations to appeal to private foundations; and

• Older writers whose reputations have faded, but who have made distinguished contributions to the cultural fabric of this country, and whose productive years may be extended and enriched by aid and recognition.

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