Colorado College Assistant Professor of English Natanya Ann Pulley has been named a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Pulley is one of 35 writers who will receive a 2022 Creative Writing Fellowship of $25,000. The NEA creative writing fellowships are highly competitive, with more than 2,000 applicants this year.

Pulley, who is Diné, with her clans being Kinyaa’áani (Towering House) and Táchii’nii (Red Running into Water), teaches contemporary fiction and nonfiction in courses such as Literature by Native American Writers, Experimental Forms in Ethnic Literature, and Topics in Native American Literature. She is the author of “With Teeth,” the winner of the 2018 Many Voices Project competition through New Rivers Press and has published stories in The Massachusetts Review, Phantom Drift, Split Lip, and The Offing, among others. Her most recent anthologized essays are included in “Shapes of Native Nonfiction” and “The Diné Reader.” Pulley also is the founding editor of Hairstreak Butterfly Review.

“We are excited to support the 2022 NEA Creative Writing Fellows in their careers, affording them the time and means and encouragement to focus on their writing,” says the NEA’s Director of Literary Arts Amy Stolls. “We look forward to reading their works in years to come and appreciate their dedication to enriching our culture through their words.”

The fellowships allow recipients to set aside time for writing, research, travel, and career development. Awardees are selected through an anonymous process and are judged on the basis of artistic excellence of the work sample they provided.  

Since 1967, the Arts Endowment has awarded more than 3,600 Creative Writing Fellowships totaling over $57 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.

See Pulley's profile page on the NEA site and read her online publications.