An academic team has compiled a dataset—including demographics, education, and geography—of every recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts’ fellowship for creative writing from 1965 to 2024. That includes a grand total of more than 3,700 recipients.
I downloaded the Excel spreadsheet and used ChatGPT to help extract big-picture insights. What I found:
- Recipients from New York lead significantly, followed by California and Massachusetts. However, Vermont comes out on top as having the highest number of grant recipients per million population. Why Vermont? Maybe because of the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and Middlebury College.
- Overall, more men than women have received grants: 58 percent versus 42 percent.
- Degrees of recipients: MFA (1,582), PhD (723), and MA (1,234) were most prevalent.
- The University of Iowa is the top university associated with NEA grant recipients who hold an MFA, although the likelihood of a recipient having an MFA from Iowa has declined over the decades, partly due to the proliferation of creative writing programs starting in the 1980s. Columbia University is second after Iowa for MFA degrees. Grant recipients with MFAs from the University of Arizona and NYU have grown over time.
- If you analyze the prevalence of specific universities across all degree types (not just the MFA), Harvard University comes in third after Iowa and Columbia.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
