MacArthur 'Genius' Grants Announced

September 21, 2011

The 2011 MacArthur Foundation Fellowships included poets Kay Ryan and A.E. Stallings, among the 22 recipients. The honor comes with $500,000 paid quarterly over five years for writers, scientists, artists, and others. The purpose of the Fellows Program is to enable recipients to exercise their own creative instincts for the benefit of human society, according to the foundation’s website.

Ryan, 65, won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for her poetry collection, The Best of It: New and Selected Poems. From 2008 to 2010 she served as U.S. Poet Laureate. The MacArthur Foundation cited Ryan for her “disarmingly clear and accessible style,” and her “incisive explorations of seemingly familiar language, ideas, and experiences,” also noting that she “surprised us with the possibilities of the medium.”

Currently serving as director of the poetry program at the Athens Centre in Greece, poet A.E. Stallings, 43, is author of two collections of poetry, Hapax and Archaic Smile, winner of the  Richard Wilbur Award. Her new book of poems, Olives, will be released in April of 2012.

Previous MacArthur fellows from the areas of fiction and poetry include: Lydia Davis, Edward P. Jones, George Saunders, Sandra Cisneros, Jorie Graham, John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich, and Charles Simic.

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