The MacArthur Foundation announced the 25 recipients of its annual fellowships, commonly known as “genius grants,” with authors Robin Wall Kimmerer and Kiese Laymon among those winning the $800,000 prizes.
Kimmerer, an ecologist and author of the bestselling 2013 book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, was given a grant for “articulating an alternative vision of environmental stewardship informed by traditional ecological knowledge.”
Laymon, author of the memoir Heavy, a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and the novel Long Division, was honored for “bearing witness to the myriad forms of violence that mark the Black experience in formally inventive fiction and nonfiction.”
J. Drew Lanham, an ornithologist whose book The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature was praised by a Kirkus reviewer as “a shrewd meditation on home, family, nature, and the author’s native South,” was awarded a grant for “creating a new model of conservation that combines conservation science with personal, historical, and cultural narratives of nature.”
Other authors to receive grants included Reuben Jonathan Miller (Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration), Jennifer Carlson (Policing the Second Amendment: Guns, Law Enforcement, and the Politics of Race), Monica Kim (The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold Histories), P. Gabrielle Foreman (Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century), and Martha Gonzalez (Chican@ Artivistas: Music, Community, and Transborder Tactics in East Los Angeles).
The MacArthur grants were first awarded in 1981. Past recipients have included Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, Joanna Scott, and Yiyun Li.
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
