I first got the news of the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship the same week that I got confirmation that my second story collection, which includes the two short stories I submitted as my application, was officially in press. It has been a strange and difficult and joyful book to write, one that asked me in various ways to think about grief and the reasons to live through it, and it was enormously reassuring to get this kind of vote of confidence just as I was nearing the end of my work on the project and getting ready to let it go out into the world. One of the questions I ask in the new collection is what it means for an institution to work of and for the public good. I’m not sure I arrived at an answer in my fiction, but I know that in my life as a citizen, I am glad the NEA is still in a position to make steady annual contributions to our country’s arts funding. I am excited every year (even the multiple previous years I applied and didn’t make the cut), to see the writers the NEA is funding—people I already know are doing important work and people whose names are new to me and whose work comes to my attention through the list of fellows. I am thrilled to be on that list this year. More practically, the NEA fellowship means I will be able to spend my semester of sabbatical doing travel and research related to the novel I am working on.