Words, Numbers, The Works

This data is sourced from the Post45 Data Collective, analyzed with pandas, and visualized with D3.js.

The writing world is famously insular. In 2014, The Atlantic ran piece on MFAs and their risings costs. Online, many other thinkpieces about MFAs and elite pedigrees abound. In 2023, the Post45 Data Collective released an index of major writing awards—every prize since 1918 worth $10,000 or more in 2022, adjusted for inflation. They published findings in Public Books.

Who wins a Whiting Award?

In 2025, ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama each won $50,000 from the Whiting Foundation—they comprised the 40th cohort of awardees.

This chart traces the flow of winners through elite institutions, MFA programs, and the Stegner Fellowship. Each band shows how many winners followed that educational path before receiving the award.

In this dataset, “elite institutions” include Ivy League schools plus Stanford and Chicago. The Stegner Fellowship is a unique Stanford program that functions like an MFA. MFA degrees are listed as the actual institution.

Elite Institutions (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, etc.)
MFA Degrees (Iowa, Columbia, NYU, etc.)
Stegner Fellowships (highly selective Stanford fellowship)

Breaking it down

Based on 348 Whiting Award winners in this dataset, 187 (53.7%) had an MFA. That's more than half of all Whiting Award winners, and most of the non-MFA winners attended non-elite institutions.

Out of these winners, 17 (4.9%) held a Stegner Fellowship. To be clear, the dataset's structure means that all Stegner Fellows are automatically associated with an elite institution (Stanford).

Among MFA recipients, 10 (5.3%) also had a Stegner Fellowship.

Category	Winners	Share

Explore the Winners

Some famous winners include Colson Whitehead, Ocean Vuong, and Jonathan Franzen.

"It's intended to win someone a year where they can think about nothing but doing their own writing," Courtney Hodell, the directory of literary programs at the Whiting Foundation said to NPR in 2025.

Search, sort, or filter the list of Whiting Award winners and explore their educational pedigrees.