$800K MacArthur Fellows ‘Genius Grants’ Go To 20 Creative Thinkers

ACROSS AMERICA — A scientist who studies the transmission of diseases, a master hula dancer and cultural preservationist, and the sitting U.S. poet laureate are among 20 new recipients of prestigious fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, known as “genius grants.”

Each of the new fellows announced Wednesday will receive a grant of $800,000 over five years to spend however they want. The fellows do not apply and are not interviewed before the award is made. Instead, fellows are nominated and endorsed by their peers and communities through an open, years-long process overseen by the foundation.

MacArthur Fellows are individuals “of outstanding talent to pursue their own creative, intellectual and professional inclinations,” according to the foundation’s website.

Marlies Carruth, who directs the MacArthur Fellows program, said this year’s fellows “are applying individual creativity with global perspective, centering connections across generations and communities.”

Fellows also include a law professor who created a database of recent Louisiana prison or jail deaths, and a National Book Award winner who has written multiple books about the resistance and activism of Black Americans in the face of injustice.

“They forge stunning forms of artistic expression from ancestral and regional traditions, heighten our attention to the natural world, improve how we process massive flows of information for the common good, and deepen understanding of systems shaping our environment,” Carruth said in an announcement.

One of the goals of the program is for fellows to support and inspire one another.

“The prize is financial, but it’s also access and being part of a community of extraordinary thinkers and doers,” Carruth told The Associated Press.

Recipients are caught unaware until they get a phone call. Ada Limón, who is in her second term as the U.S. poet laureate, told the AP that she missed the announcement call because of the death of her grandmother and learned about her selection in an email. She wept.

“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,” Limón said, speaking to the AP from her home in Lexington, Kentucky.

Linsey Marr, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech whose studies of how viruses move through the air and on contaminated objects proved relevant during the COVID-19 pandemic, didn’t recognize the number and ignored the call.

With some skepticism, he answered a call coming into her office line from the same number.

“To think that I’ve actually been selected as one [of the MacArthur Fellows] is really mind-blowing,” she said.

Protect Democracy co-founder and executive director Ian Bassin told the AP the fellowship is both an opportunity and a responsibility. His organization helped shape legislation that passed in December to overhaul the Electoral Count Act, which clarifies parts of an 1887 law to make it harder for future presidents to seek to prevent the peaceful transfer of power.

“The work of protecting and perfecting our democracy is far from complete,” he said. “And so this just underscores for me the obligation I think I now have to do my part in fishing that work.”

The MacArthur Foundation has awarded genius grants to 1,030 recipients since 1981.

» Read more about the Class of 2023 MacArthur Fellows.