Jason Mott Receives NEA Fellowship

Jason Mott ’06, ’08M, author and an associate professor in UNCW’s Department of Creative Writing, has been selected to receive a 2024 Creative Writing Fellowship of $25,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts. Mott is one of 35 writers awarded the highly competitive fellowship. The NEA received more than 2,100 applications.

“I'm honored to receive this fellowship,” said Mott. “One of the most difficult things to do while teaching and navigating life is carve out time for research. So, I'm absolutely thrilled that this fellowship will allow me to set aside a bit more time to enrich my writing.”

This year’s fellowships are in fiction and creative nonfiction and enable the recipients to reserve time for writing, research, travel, and general career development. Fellows are selected through an anonymous review process and judged on artistic excellence of the work sample they provided.

“The application pools for such NEA writing fellowships are quite large and extraordinarily competitive,” said UNCW Creative Writing Department Chair Mark Cox. “Receiving one is a great accomplishment. I am delighted that Jason’s outstanding work continues to be honored by our national writing and literature community.” 

Mott is a bestselling author of four novels and has received numerous awards and accolades for his work including The Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction, a Carnegie Medals For Excellence in Fiction Longlist selection, an Aspen Words Literary Prize Longlist selection, a Chatauqua Prize Finalist, a Joyce Carol Oates Prize Longlist selection and in 2021 his most recent novel, Hell of a Book, was the winner of the National Book Award for Fiction. 

NEA Director of Literary Arts Amy Stolls stated in a release, “The National Endowment for the Arts is proud to continue its longstanding investment in our nation’s writers. It is through their creativity and dedication that our nation’s literary landscape continues to be enriched with stories, perspectives and ideas that reflect the rich diversity of cultures and strengthens our democracy.” 

Since 1967, the NEA has awarded more than 3,700 Creative Writing Fellowships totaling over $58 million. Many American recipients of the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award and Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and Fiction were recipients of National Endowment for the Arts fellowships early in their careers.