October 12, 2022, 12:51pm
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.