This year the MacArthur Foundation anointed twenty-three recipients for the MacArthur “Genius” grant. Their professions range from filmmaker, mathematician, economist, neurobiologist, photographer, stringed-instrument bow maker, to, of course, writer. Authors Junot Díaz and Dinaw Mengestu received this year’s honor, which includes a prize of $500,000 distributed over five years in quarterly installments. The Fellows are chosen by nominators selected by the MacArthur Fellows Program, and the nominations are evaluated by a selection committee. The Fellows Program was initiated in 1981.

Díaz, forty-three, won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for his novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and currently serves as the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mengestu, thirty-four, is one of the younger members of this year’s MacArthur Fellows group. He was born in Ethiopia and now lives in Washington, D.C. His novels are The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears and the more recent How to Read the Air.

The purpose of the MacArthur Fellows Program is to award “unrestricted fellowships to talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction,” according to the description at the Foundation’s website. Recent winners with literary arts backgrounds include prose writers George Saunders, Patricia Hampl, David Foster Wallace, Yiyun Li, Stuart Dybek, and Edward P. Jones, and poets Kay Ryan, Heather McHugh, C.D. Wright, Anne Carson, and Campbell McGrath.

View the complete list of fellows here: http://www.macfound.org/fellows/class/2012/.