This year's MacArthur “Genius” grant winners include other writers, artists and storytellers

NEW YORK (AP) — The 2024 class of John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellows includes more writers, artists and storytellers than in previous years, although the so-called List of “Genius Scholarships.” also includes several scientists.

The interdisciplinary awards announced on Tuesday come with a $800,000 grant over five years that the 22 recipients – including a novelist Ling MaPoets and writers Juan Felipe Herreracabaret artist Justin Vivian Bond and visual artist Ebony G. Patterson – are allowed to use as they wish.

Nominees are considered over the years, recommended by peers, vetted by the Foundation, and vetted by an independent advisory board whose composition changes over time. “While each course is never an immediate response to a particular moment, sometimes themes emerge,” said Marlies Carruth, director of the MacArthur Fellows program.

“We need to at least see the diversity, the strength and the number of nominations in the field of literary arts as a response to the zeitgeist, the desire to tell stories and to revive certain stories that have not yet been told,” Carruth said.

It is not possible to apply for the award and the Foundation asks recommenders and peers not to inform the nominee that they are being considered.

“Most of them understand the value of discretion and secrecy,” Carruth said of the nominators. The confidentiality also allows them to be very honest, she said.

Because of this secrecy, it may be difficult for the foundation to actually reach recipients.

Jason Reynoldsthe children's and young adult author and former National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, said he was grateful and overwhelmed when he finally answered the call.

“I had just returned from caring for my mother in the hospital,” he said. “Something like that happens in real life, it's super intense, pressured and difficult. And there’s one call that keeps coming in.”

Reynolds said he is still thinking about what the award will mean for his work, which includes the “Track” series as well as comics and other genre-spanning works that often reflect the experiences of black children. His first love story, the young adult novel “Twenty-Four Seconds from Now…” about a black boy’s first sexual relationship, will be published on October 8th.

“Boys are never asked, it’s not even considered that we have feelings in that moment, right? Not just biological desires,” he said.

The foundation looks for people who will be “empowered” by the award, meaning they have both a track record of success in work and the potential to do further exceptional work, Carruth said. They are also happy to support people collaborating and investing outside their area of ​​expertise.

Nicola Dell, a computer and information scientist at Cornell Tech, would like to thank her many colleagues, students, and community groups who have worked with her to research how technology can be used to harass and abuse people, and to develop tools to develop to help survivors of such abuse.

“It’s a team effort, not just mine,” she said, while also saying it was an incredible vote of confidence to receive the award. She is co-founder of the Clinic to End Tech Abuse, which advises those affected being stalked or harassed by intimate partners to help them both escape surveillance and use technology safely, for example to apply for jobs or accommodation.

Dell said it tried to “act as a bridge between the social services, essentially between animal shelters, nonprofits, people who are very far from big tech companies and the designers and teams and the tech companies that are responsible for these products and “We are responsible for controlling these products.”

Astronomer Keivan G. Stassun, a professor at Vanderbilt University, researches, among other things, the evolution of stars, but is also committed to recruiting and integrating diverse students into the natural sciences. He said he chose to be home when the announcement was made.

Stassun co-founded a joint recruitment and preparation program diverse students who want to pursue advanced degrees in the sciences at Vanderbilt and Fisk University, a historically black university. He recently founded a center to help neurodiverse people find jobs and help companies hire them. One of his children is autistic and he spoke about how, as a parent, he is looking to his child's future and that he is motivated to improve the lives of neurodiverse adults.

“Science relies on access to the full human diversity of mind to make the mysteries of the cosmos understandable, knowable and expressable in human terms,” Stassun said. “It is certainly true that in the everyday life and practice of astrophysical discoveries on the one hand and building human talent pipelines on the other, these two things require different skills and an investment of time and care. But I really see that one is in service of the other.”

He expressed great pride in the work of graduates of the Fisk-Vanderbilt Master's-to-PhD Bridge Program, which he said is one of the leading producers of Black, Hispanic and Native American doctoral students in the sciences.

“That’s something,” he said.

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