Today, the National Endowment for the Arts announced that Jill Christman is one of 36 writers who will receive an FY 2020 Creative Writing Fellowship of $25,000. These fellowships enable the recipients to set aside time for writing, research, travel, and general career advancement. Fellows are selected through a highly-competitive, anonymous process and are judged on the artistic excellence of the work sample provided.

“The National Endowment for the Arts is proud to support our nation’s writers, including Jill Christman, and the artistry, creativity, and dedication that go into their work,” said Mary Anne Carter, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Jill Christman was selected from nearly 1,700 eligible applicants. Fellowships alternate between poetry and prose each year and this year’s fellowships are to support prose writers. The full list of FY 2020 Creative Writing Fellows is available here.

Jill Christman is a professor of English at Ball State University who teaches a wide range of undergraduate and graduate creative nonfiction courses. In Fall 2019, she taught an immersive learning course, entitled “Rape Culture in the Age of #MeToo” that explored rape culture and sexual assault on college campuses across the nation. Her students produced the podcast Indelible. Christman is the author of two memoirs, Darkroom: A Family Exposure (AWP Award Series in Creative Nonfiction winner) and Borrowed Babies: Apprenticing for Motherhood, and her essays have appeared in several magazines and journals, including Brevity, River Teeth, and Fourth Genre. Christman has also served on the Board of Trustees of The Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP), is a regular presenter at the River Teeth Nonfiction Conference, and was a recent recipient of the Outstanding Creative Endeavor Award.

Since 1967, the Arts Endowment has awarded more than 3,500 Creative Writing Fellowships totaling over $55 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.

Visit the agency’s Literature Fellowships webpage to read excerpts by and features on past Creative Writing Fellows and recipients of Literature Fellowships for translation projects. For more information on literature at the National Endowment for the Arts, go to arts.gov.

You can read more about Jill and her work here.