Lee Gutkind has a few explanatory words on the subject.

Also check out the CSPAN files at the bottom of this post.

   
 
This may come as a surprise, but I don’t know who actually coined the term creative nonfiction. As far as I know, nobody knows, exactly. I have been using it since the 1970s, although if we were to pinpoint a time when the term became “official,” it would be 1983, at a meeting convened by the National Endowment for the Arts to deal with the question of what, exactly, to call the genre as a category for the NEA’s creative writing fellowships. Initially, the fellowships bestowed grant money ($7,500 at the time; today, $20,000) to poets and fiction writers only, although the NEA had long recognized the “art” of nonfiction and been trying to find a way to describe the category so writers would understand what kind of work to submit for consideration.

via www.creativenonfiction.org