This year’s “genius” MacArthur fellows include more writers, artists and storytellers

NEW YORK – The 2024 class of John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellows includes more writers, artists and storytellers than in recent years, although the list of so-called “genius grants” also includes several scientists.

The interdisciplinary awards announced Tuesday come with a grant of $800,000 over five years that the 22 recipients — including fiction writer Ling Ma, poet and novelist Juan Felipe Herrera, comedian Justin Vivian Bond and visual artist Ebony G. Patterson — can use however they but want.

Nominees are reviewed over the years, recommended by their peers, vetted by the foundation and judged by an independent advisory board, whose membership changes over time. While each lesson is never an immediate response to a specific moment, themes do emerge at times, says Marlies Carruth, director of the MacArthur Fellows Program.

“At the very least, we should see the diversity, strength and number of nominations in the literary arts world as a response to the spirit of the times, the desire to tell stories and to resurrect certain stories that have not yet been told,” Carruth said. .

It is not possible to apply for the award and the foundation requests that recommenders and peers not tell the nominee that they are being considered.

“Most of them understand the value of discretion, of secrecy,” Carruth said, speaking of the nominees. The confidentiality also allows them to be very honest, she said.

This secrecy can make it difficult for the foundation to actually reach the recipients.

Jason Reynolds, a children’s and young adult writer and former national ambassador for young adult literature, said he was grateful and overwhelmed when he finally answered the call.

“I had just gotten back from caring for my mother in the hospital,” he said. “It seems like there are all these real life things happening that are super intense, pressured and heavy. And there is a phone call that keeps coming in.”

Reynolds said he was still thinking about what the award will mean for his work, which includes the “Track” series, as well as comic books and other cross-genre work that often reflects the experiences of black children. His first love story, the young adult novel “Twenty-Four Seconds From Now…”, about a black boy’s first sexual relationship, will be released on October 8.

“Guys are never asked, never even considered, that we have feelings around this moment, right? Not just biological desires,” he said.

The foundation looks for people who are “enabled” by the award, meaning they have both a track record of work and the potential to produce additional extraordinary work, Carruth said. They are also enthusiastic about supporting people who collaborate and invest outside their specific discipline.

Nicola Dell, a computer and information scientist at Cornell Tech, wanted to mention her many collaborators, students and community groups who have worked with her to investigate how technology can be used to harass and abuse people and to develop tools to help survivors of to help such abuse. .

“It’s a team effort, not just mine,” she said, also saying it was an incredible vote of confidence to receive the award. She is co-founder of the Clinic to End Tech Abuse, which consults with people stalked or harassed by intimate partners to help them escape surveillance and safely use technologies to do things like apply for jobs and housing.

Dell said it has tried to serve “as a bridge between the social services, basically shelters, nonprofits, people who are very far removed from big tech companies and the designers and teams and the tech companies that are responsible for these products and for checking this. products.”

Astronomer Keivan G. Stassun, a professor at Vanderbilt University, studies stellar evolution, among other things, but he has also been a champion of recruiting and involving diverse students in science. He said he chose to be home when the announcement was made.

Stassun co-founded a joint program to recruit and prepare diverse students to pursue advanced degrees in science at Vanderbilt and Fisk University, a historically black university. More recently, he founded a center to help neurodiverse people find jobs and help companies hire them. One of his children is autistic and he talked about being a parent looking to his child’s future and his motivation to improve the lives of neurodiverse adults.

“Science depends on access to the full human diversity of mind to make the mysteries of the cosmos understandable, knowable and expressed in human terms,” Stassun said. “It is certainly true that in the day-to-day business of doing the work of astrophysical discovery on the one hand and building pipelines for human talent on the other, yes, these two things in their operation require a different set of skills and an investment of time and care. But I really see that one is very much in service of the other.”

He expressed tremendous pride in the work of the students graduating from the Fisk-Vanderbilt Master’s-to-PhD Bridge Program, which he said is one of the leading producers of Black, Hispanic and Native American doctoral students in the natural sciences.

“That’s something,” he said.

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