Poet Marie Howe, one of this year's winners of the Pulitzer Prize, says being a writer is often less a career than a vocation. You rely on teaching and other outside work and seek support from foundations or from a government agency, like the National Endowment for the Arts.
“Everybody applies for an NEA grant, year after after year, and if you get it, it's like wow — it's huge," says Howe, a Pulitzer winner for “New and Selected Poems” and a former NEA creative writing fellow. “It's not just the money. It's also deep encouragement. I just felt so grateful. It made a big, big difference. It gives you courage. It says to you, ‘Go on, keep doing it.’”
