The recipients of the 2024 MacArthur Foundation Fellowships have been announced. Commonly known as the Genius Grant, it provides a $800,000 stipend to each Fellow, disbursed over five years. Marlies A. Carruth, Director of the MacArthur Fellows says, “The 2024 MacArthur Fellows pursue rigorous inquiry with aspiration and purpose. They expose biases built into emerging technologies and social systems and fill critical gaps in the knowledge of cycles that sustain life on Earth. Their work highlights our shared humanity, centering the agency of disabled people, the humor and histories of Indigenous communities, the emotional lives of adolescents, and perspectives of rural Americans.”
Many of the 22 MacArthur Fellows this year have published books, whether as their profession, like young adult and middle grade author Jason Reynolds, or as a result of their work, like disability justice activist Alice Wong. Here are ten of this year’s MacArthur Fellows who are authors, starting with those who received the fellowship for their writing.
2024 MacArthur Fellows: Authors and Poets
Jericho Brown, Pulitzer-winning poet: The Tradition, The New Testament, Please, and more
Juan Felipe Herrera, U.S. Poet Laureate: Imagine, Notes on the Assemblage, Every Day We Get More Illegal, and more.
Ling Ma, Kirkus Prize-winning author: Severance and Bliss Montage
Jason Reynolds, New York Times bestselling YA and middle grade author: Long Way Down, Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, All-American Boys, and more
Loka Ashwood, sociologist: For-Profit Democracy
Ruha Benjamin, transdisciplinary scholar: Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want, Imagination: A Manifesto, and more
Jennifer L. Morgan, historian: Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery, Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic, Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas, and more
Shailaja Paik, historian: The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India and Dalit Women’s Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination
Dorothy Roberts, legal scholar and public policy researcher: Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World, and more
Alice Wong, disability justice activist: Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century, Disability Intimacy: Essays on Love, Care, and Desire, Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life, and more
Read more about this year’s 2024 MacArthur Fellows at NPR and the New York Times.
Find more news and stories of interest from the book world in Breaking in Books.
Source : These Authors are Geniuses: Meet the 2024 MacArthur Fellows
