ACTIVISTS, SCIENTISTS, AUTHORS AMONG 2020 ‘GENIUS GRANT’ FELLOWS

An activist speaking out about inadequate waste and water sanitation in rural America, an author of young adult and children’s literature reflecting the world’s diversity, and a neuroscientist who used mathematics to study the brain’s development are among the 21 recipients of this year’s “genius grants.”

The John D. and Catherine T. Macarthur Foundation announced the fellowships Tuesday. Each will receive $625,000 over five years to spend as they please.

Writers, sociologists, scientists, a documentary filmmaker, a legal scholar and an environmental health advocate are among the luminaries named this year. The Chicago-based foundation has awarded the “genius grants” every year since 1981 to help further the pursuits of people with outstanding talent.

Macarthur Fellows managing director Cecilia Conrad says this year’s group offers a reason to celebrate as the nation deals with civil unrest, a global pandemic and natural disasters.

“They are asking critical questions, developing innovative technologies and public policies, enriching our understanding of the human condition, and producing works of art that provoke and inspire us,” Conrad said.

Environmental activist Catherine Coleman Flowers, who grew up in Lowndes County, Ala., is the founding director of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice in Montgomery. The former high school teacher in Detroit

and Washington, D.C., is also a senior fellow for the Center for Earth Ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York.

Flowers, 62, has documented how a lack of access to sufficient and sustained water treatment and clean water contributes to a cycle of poverty, particularly in rural, predominantly Black areas such as Lowndes County.

“I’ve been interested in environmental health since crop dusters used to spray DDT over homes and we could see dead birds and snakes lying around from the effects of the chemical,” Flowers told the Associated Press.

Flowers said her work has taught her to trust her instincts and work with scientists to prove if what is being seen or experienced is true.

Other fellows announced Tuesday were author Jacqueline Woodson, University of Utah evolutionary geneticist Nels Elde, University of Minnesota cognitive neuroscientist Damien Fair, econometrician Isaiah Andrews, writer and sociologist Tressie Mcmillan Cottom, chemical engineer Paul Dauenhauer, playwright Larissa Fasthorse, anthropologist Mary L. Gray, fiction writers N.K. Jemisin and Cristina Rivera Garza, artist Ralph Lemon, cellular and developmental biologist Polina V. Lishko, property law scholar Thomas Wilson Mitchell, historian Natalia Molina, poet Fred Moten, singer and composer Cecile Mclorin Salvant, experimental physicist Monika Schleiersmith, biological chemist Mohammad R. Seyedsayamdost, sociologist Forrest Stuart and documentary filmmaker Nanfu Wang.