Publishers Weekly Online reports that the National Endowment for the Arts will award $20.2 million to fund 908 grants. The Arts Endowment will distribute most of the money during FY 2008 to nonprofit national, regional, state, and local organizations across the country through the NEA’s Access to Artistic Excellence category. Additionally, it will award 42 creative writing fellowships to individual writers totaling more than $1 million. The literature fellowships recognize prose writers, encouraging the production of new work by affording them the time and means to write. Out of more than 700 applications, the NEA chose 42 literature fellows, who will each receive a $25,000 award. Among the writers who received awards are Nona Caspers, winner of AWP’s 2005 Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction (Heaver Than Air, UMass Press, 2006), Courtney A. Brkic (The Stone Fields: An Epitaph for the Living, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004), Ravi Howard (Like Trees Walking, Amistad, 2007) and Tara Ison (The List, Scribner, 2007).