Rice professor awarded MacArthur genius grant
Author and Rice University professor Kiese Laymon on Wednesday became the latest Houston resident to hold a MacArthur Fellowship, also known as the “genius grant.”
Laymon, from Jackson, Miss., is the second Rice faculty member to ever win the award, according to the university. His essays, memoirs and fiction — which explore the forms of violence marking the Black experience — have received national acclaim.
“I’m not big into awards and recognition, but this one feels special,” Laymon, 48, said. “Revision and Mississippi did this. I’m just thankful. Some really incredible people thought my work was OK. That’s a big deal to me.”
Laymon’s first two books, the novel “Long Division” and the essay collection “How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America,” were first published in 2013, and he followed with the bestselling “Heavy: An American Memoir” in 2018. His honors include an NAACP Image Award for “Long Division” and a 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction for “Heavy.”
He is one of 25 people this year to receive a genius grant as an investment in their creative work. The fellows receive an
$800,000 stipend over five years, and Laymon said he plans to use some of the grant money to facilitate middle school literary arts initiatives in Houston and Jackson — and create connections between the two cities’ programs.
Laymon is the first from the humanities school to be named a fellow. Rebecca Richards-Kortum, the Malcolm Gillis university professor of bioengineering and director of the Rice 360° Institute for Global Health, in 2016 was the first Rice faculty member to receive the honor.
“This is a huge win for Kiese, for Rice’s School of Humanities and for the university as a whole,” President Reginald DesRoches said. “Any time one of our professors’ work is recognized by a prestigious organization such as the MacArthur Foundation, it shines a light on the extremely high-caliber faculty at Rice and the impact of their research, scholarship and creative pursuits.”
Kathleen Canning, Rice’s dean of humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon professor of history, said she has noticed Laymon’s influence on students. He began teaching creative writing at the School of Humanities in January.
“As I have observed in only his first two semesters at Rice, he is a writer whose texts and teaching literally change the world, empowering students by the way he reads them, engages their stories and inspires them to write their worlds and their experiences,” Canning said.
Mississippi is also at the center of much of Laymon’s writing, and he said he hopes new readers are inspired to think differently about their own hometowns.
“I hope they come to the work wanting to experience Mississippi in a different way,” Laymon said. “And I hope they leave the work with a desire to write about their homes in really, honest, complicated, loving ways.”
The author is one of two Texans to receive the fellowship this cycle. Moriba Jah, an astrodynamicist, space environmentalist and aerospace engineer at the University of Texas at Austin, was also awarded the genius grant.
An associate professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering’s Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, Jah is currently tracking the more-than 30,000 human-made objects orbiting the earth, according to UT-Austin. Knowing those locations could help scientists determine when collisions might occur, he said.
Jah is the 10th UT-Austin faculty member to receive a MacArthur Foundation fellowship.