NEA Creative Writing Fellowships

The National Endowment for the Arts has awarded Creative Writing Fellowships since 1967, and the list of recipients before they were famous — Louise Glück, Tobias Wolff, Oscar Hijuelos, Jericho Brown — is the program's best argument. Fellowships are $25,000, unrestricted, awarded on the strength of a work sample alone, judged anonymously.

Poetry and prose alternate years (applications in one genre per cycle), acceptance runs around 3–4 percent, and there is no application fee. It remains the single most consequential no-strings grant a U.S. poet can win without a book requirement, nomination, or age limit.