How to Apply for a National Endowment for the Arts Grant

Sandra Gail Lambert, a 2018 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Creative Writing Fellow, explained the nuts and bolts of qualifying and applying for an NEA grant and shared how the Fellowship benefited her writing career.

Establishment of the NEA Fellowship

Federal programs supporting arts began in the 1960s with the formation of the National Endowment for Arts. Literature is the only art form where individual artists are given this award. Literature consists of poetry or prose (fiction and creative non-fiction). There is a two-year cycle, so if poetry is featured one year, prose is featured the next. (There is also a Translation project, but Lambert’s talk focused on writing.)

Approximately 1,500 enter annually, and only one fellowship is awarded per year; $25,000.00 is awarded to the Creative Writing Fellow.

Prose Eligibility

You are eligible to apply if you have published:

• At least five different short stories, works of short fiction, excerpts from novels or memoirs, or creative essays (or any combination thereof) in two or more literary journals, anthologies, or publications that regularly include fiction and/or creative nonfiction as a portion of their format
• Or a volume of short fiction or a collection of short stories
• Or a novel or novella
• Or a volume of creative non-fiction

Although the eligibility rules do not say so in so many words, self-published books are not eligible.

Application

There is no charge to apply. Submit only one application for 2020 funding. For Prose, apply between January 1, 2019, and March 6, 2019. Always apply, if for no other reason than it can help your writing career. “You just never know,” Lambert said.

In the application process, don’t get hung up on the Project Description.

Award Benefits

Lambert said by the time she learned she had won, she had completed the book she had proposed, A Certain Loneliness, and it had been published by the University of Nebraska Press. She used her award money, which is not given out in a lump sum but as reimbursement for reported expenses, to hire a publicist and pay for book-tour travel to promote the book.

How the Award Changed Her

“One little piece of success can build into something more,” she said. “I asked knowledgeable people, ‘Do I say I was awarded the NEA Creative Fellowship or I earned the Fellowship?'” She was told, “You ARE the Creative Fellow.”

The award has opened doors for her.

A Certain Loneliness is a frank and funny memoir of Lambert’s lifelong struggle with isolation and independence after contracting polio as a child, she probes the intersection of disability, queerness, and desire. Frustrations, slapstick moments, and grand triumphs are all couched in the long history of humanity’s relationship to the natural world.

Lambert grew up a military brat and spent most of her childhood in Norway with the exception of a stint at the Warm Springs Polio Foundation in Georgia. She was well into her forties before thinking of herself as a writer, and her debut novel, The River’s Memory, was published when she was sixty-two. These days she lives in Gainesville, Florida.

Summary of talk by Penny Church-Pupke.