Montclair’s Dionne Ford named NEA Creative Writing Fellow
Today, the National Endowment for the Arts announced that Dionne Ford is one of 36 writers who will receive an FY 2018 Creative Writing Fellowship of $25,000.
“The National Endowment for the Arts is proud to provide crucial funding to support these writers in their creative endeavors and to continue expanding the range of ideas and viewpoints available to readers,” said Amy Stolls, NEA director of literature, in a release.
Ford was selected from nearly 1,700 eligible applicants. Through its Creative Writing Fellowships, the NEA gives writers the freedom to create, revise, conduct research, and connect with readers. Applications are reviewed by a panel through
an anonymous process and are judged solely on the artistic excellence of the work sample provided. Fellowships alternate between poetry and prose each year and this year’s fellowships are to support prose—works of fiction and creative nonfiction. The full list of FY 2018 Creative Writing Fellows is available here.
Dionne Ford is the author of the memoir "Finding Josephine," forthcoming from G.P. Putnam's Sons and co-editor of the anthology "Shared Legacies: Narratives of Race and Reconciliation by Descendants of Slaveholders and the Enslaved," forthcoming from Rutgers University Press. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, LitHub, More, Rumpus and Ebony and won awards from the National Association of Black Journalists and the Newswomen’s Club of New York. Other honors include grants from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Geraldine R. Dodge foundation and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Hedgebrook and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
She has an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University and lives in Montclair with her husband and two daughters.
Since 1967, the NEA has awarded more than 3,400 Creative Writing Fellowships worth $46 million. Many American recipients of the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and Fiction were recipients of NEA fellowships early in their careers.
For more information on NEA Creative Writing Fellowships, visit the NEA’s Writers' Corner.