Foundation gives 25 new fellows $625,000 each
Recipients to pursue ‘high-risk, high-reward’ projects with stipend
Reginald Dwayne Betts was at home in New Haven, Conn., when his phone rang with a number he didn’t recognize. The stranger on the other end of the line asked if he was alone. Betts replied that his two sons were downstairs. The stranger told him to shut the door.
He felt like a guileless victim in a horror movie, but followed instructions. Once he was safely sealed off from his family, the voice on the phone revealed the twist: The 40-year-old poet and advocate for incarcerated people — Betts used to be one — had been chosen as a 2021 MacArthur Fellow. The honor comes with a $625,000 stipend, paid out over five years, to use however he sees fit.
Betts was speechless. “Did you expect this?’ ” he remembers the voice asking. That’s when he started laughing.
“How can you expect something like this?” Betts told the
Washington Post.
Betts is one of 25 Americans who received similar calls from staffers at the Chicago-based John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Known colloquially as “genius” grants, the fellowships are designed to “encourage people of outstanding talent to pursue their own creative, intellectual, and professional inclinations.” The process of choosing each year’s fellows is highly secretive, with experts from a cross section of professions asked to nominate colleagues who are doing cutting-edge work. Nominees are given no notice they’re even being considered for an award until they’re congratulated.
Betts, who grew up in Suitland, Md., intended to become an engineer. But before he finished high school he was sentenced to nine years in prison for a carjacking he and a friend committed when he was 16. While serving time, he encountered a book of poetry by Black writers that convinced him of the genre’s power. Since his release, he’s published three collections of poetry and a memoir, graduated from Yale Law School and served on the Obama administration’s Council on Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. He recently started a nonprofit to build prison libraries
and deliver millions of books to incarcerated people.
“I hope that what I can do for some other folks is show them that somebody cares about their existence,” Betts says.
Other members of this year’s class of fellows includes a
painter, a music critic, a cellular biophysicist, a choreographer a geomorphologist, and Ibram X. Kendi, a historian and author of the bestselling books, How to Be
an Antiracist and Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America.