Our last issue covered practices for getting your writing published. Now, let’s turn our attention to opportunities for financing your writing. Want dedicated time to write or an impressive line on your CV? This installment on contests, grants, and fellowships might be a good fit for you.

Contests

If you’ve ever considered entering a writing contest, whether run by a literary journal or an organization, you know they can be competitive and expensive to enter. All the same, the payouts—which can be hundreds or even thousands of dollars—keep many writers submitting year after year. Have you ever questioned whether those pricey submission fees are really worth it? So did Suzannah Windsor Freeman. She writes about her experiences in “The Pros and Cons of Entering Writing Contests” over at Write It Sideways. Author Amy Cook also reflects on writing contests and how to evaluate whether they are worth the entry fee in “The Truth about Writing Contests” at Writer's Digest.

Still not sure where to submit? Poets & Writers offers a comprehensive Guide to Writing Contests ($4.99 for a PDF copy), which provides “expert advice from contest judges, recent winners, literary agents, and editors, so that you can make smart decisions about submitting your work.”

Grants & Fellowships

Typically, an academic fellowship will offer better funding and, thus, more time to pursue a current writing project. If you are fresh out of academia and interested in continuing to teach or perform research, you might consider this type of fellowship. In “The Benefits of the University-Based Creative Writing Fellowship,” Sarah Katz reviews the major academic fellowships (the Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, the Halls and Wallace Poetry Fellowships, and the McCreight, Houck Smith, and Djerassi Fiction Fellowships at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to name a few). This article and many others are available in AWP’s Writer’s Notebook.

Those fellowships and grants that are not attached to academic institutions can offer unrestricted income for the pursuit of a well-defined writing project. Though often smaller than the stipends that academic fellowships provide, they can allow artists the flexibility of taking time away from work to complete a manuscript or similar project. Cristin O’Keefe Aptowic argues that applying for these grants is valuable even if you don’t receive them in her article “How Applying For Writing Grants (Even If You Don’t Get Them) Can Help You Be A Better Writer,” published in Writer’s Digest:

Because to me the value of these applications isn’t just the financial support they can provide if you win one. No, there is a lot to be gleaned from those first steps too: to find yourself and your project worthy enough to put in an application. That, my friends, can be the real game-changer.

For more tips on how to apply for a grant, check out former Writer to Writer mentee Sarah Dalton’s “How I Won My First Artist Grant” in the Writer’s Notebook.

For now, we’ll leave you with the following databases of funding opportunities:

• AWP's Opportunities for Grants, Awards, & Publication
• Poet & Writers’ Writing Contests, Grants & Awards Database and their handy Submission Calendar.
• AWP’s Writer's Calendar also offers a list of upcoming events for writers; deadlines for grants and awards; calls for submissions; and deadlines for AWP contests and programs.
• PEN America’s Grants and Awards list (requires subscription).
• Candid's Foundation Grants to Individuals Online, a searchable subscription service that profiles nearly 10,000 grant-makers.
• FundsforWriters provides additional information on grants and other funding opportunities, as well as advice on crafting strong submissions.

Be sure to check out our next issue, where we talk about marketing and promoting your work.

Warm Wishes,

Your Membership Team