On Tuesday the MacArthur Foundation announced its annual class of fellows, which includes the writers Ibram X. Kendi, Hanif Abdurraqib, and Daniel Alarcón.
The fellowship, often called a “genius” award, comes with a $625,000 grant that recipients can use however they wish. Every year, between 20 and 30 fellows are honored for their work in a variety of disciplines in the arts and sciences, and literary figures are typically well-represented. Past MacArthur fellows include Ta-Nehisi Coates, Cormac McCarthy, N.K. Jemisin, Ben Lerner, and Yiyun Li.
Kendi is the author of the bestseller How To Be an Antiracist and director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. He told the New York Times that being named a MacArthur fellow represents a validation of his research, which is often emotionally difficult, misunderstood, and harshly criticized.
“It’s very meaningful—I think to anyone who studies a topic where there’s a lot of acrimony and a lot of pain—to be recognized and to get love mail sometimes,” he told the Times. “And this is one of the greatest forms of that I have ever received.”
Abdurraqib is a poet and music journalist whose 2019 book on the hip-hop group A Tribe Called Quest, Go Ahead in the Rain, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and a National Book Critics Circle Award. Alarcón is the author of the acclaimed novels War by Candlelight and Lost City Radio.
Other writers among the 2021 class of fellows are poet Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet and translator Don Mee Choi, art historian and curator Nicole Fleetwood, and political scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor.
Mark Athitakis is a journalist in Phoenix who writes about books for the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere.
