Here are this year’s literary MacArthur fellows.
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has announced the 25 recipients of its 2022 fellowships (colloquially known as the “genius grant”), and as ever, the group represents a fascinating array of people at the tops of their diverse fields.
This year’s group includes a jazz cellist and composer, an astrodynamicist, a health justice lawyer, and four people within the literary world: P. Gabrielle Foreman, a literary historian and digital humanist whose work focuses on recovering nineteenth-century collective Black organizing efforts; Robin Wall Kimmerer, a plant ecologist, educator, and author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, among other works; Joseph Drew Lanham, an ornithologist, naturalist, and author of The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature; and Kiese Laymon, a writer across genres whose work—including Heavy: An American Memoir and Long Division—”bear[s] witness to the myriad forms of violence that mark the Black experience.”
The MacArthur fellowship is an “$800,000, no-strings-attached award to extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential.”
See a list of all this year’s thoroughly impressive fellows here.
