Jason Mott

Jason Mott, a National Book Award-winning 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, according to a news release. The NEA received more than 2,100 applications. 

“One of the most difficult things to do while teaching and navigating life is carve out time for research," Mott said in the release, "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, according to the release. Fellows are selected through an anonymous review process and judged on artistic excellence of the work sample they provided.

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 and a Joyce Carol Oates Prize Longlist selection, the release stated. In 2021 his most recent novel, Hell of a Book, was the winner of the National Book Award for Fiction.