20 AWARDED ‘GENIUS GRANT’ FELLOWSHIPS
U.S. poet laureate, artists, scientists among recipients
A scientist who studies the airborne transmission of diseases, a master hula dancer and cultural preservationist, and the sitting U.S. poet laureate were among the 20 new recipients of the prestigious fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, known as “genius grants,” announced on Wednesday.
MacArthur fellows receive a grant of $800,000 over five years to spend however they want. Fellows are nominated and endorsed by their peers and communities through an often yearslong process that the foundation oversees. They do not apply and are never officially interviewed for the fellowship before it is awarded.
Ada Limón, who recently began her second term as the country’s poet laureate, said she first missed a call the day after her grandmother had died. It wasn’t until the foundation emailed her that she called back. She said she wept when she heard the news.
“I felt like losing the matriarch of my family and then receiving this, it felt like it was a gift from her in some ways,” she said, speaking from her home in Lexington, Ky.
“One of the things that feels most emotional and remarkable to me is that this recognition is coming from within the poetry community,” Limón said.
The foundation has run the fellowship since 1981 and selected more than 1,030 recipients. The awards are given to individuals “of outstanding talent to pursue their own creative, intellectual, and professional inclinations,” according to the foundation’s website, and the grants are not tied to a specific project or institution.
The 2023 class of fellows includes Andrea Armstrong, professor at Loyola University New Orleans, College of Law, who created a database of everyone in Louisiana who has died in prison or jail since 2015; Patrick Makuakane, a master teacher of hula who is dedicated to preserving Hawaiian cultural heritage; and National Book Award winner Imani Perry, who has authored multiple books about the resistance and activism of Black Americans in the face of injustice.
Linsey Marr, an environmental engineer, was in her office when an unknown number called her cellphone.
“To think that I’ve actually been selected as one is really mind-blowing,” she said, of the MacArthur fellows.
Before the pandemic, Marr studied questions about how viruses moved through the air and how much transmission happens by people breathing in the virus versus from contaminated objects. Her expertise became relevant after the outbreak of COVID-19.
Other recipients 2023 fellowship include E. Tendayi Achiume, a legal scholar examining global migration; Rina Foygel Barber, a statistician who has developed tools to improve the accuracy of predictions made by machine learning models; Ian Bassin, co-founder and executive director of Protect Democracy; Jason D. Buenrostro, a cellular and molecular biologist who developed new methods and tools to better understand how and when genes are expressed; Diana Greene Foster, a demographer and reproductive health researcher who has documented the impact of access to contraception or abortion on women’s lives; Lucy Hutyra, an environmental ecologist who studies the movement of carbon through urban environments; fiction writer Manuel Muñoz whose stories explore the experiences of the Mexican American community in California’s Central Valley; and A. Park Williams, a hydroclimatologist studying the impact of climate change on wildfires, drought and forest growth.