Poet Natalie Diaz, fiction and nonfiction writer John Keene, and fiction writer Kelly Link were recently awarded 2018 MacArthur “Genius” Fellowships in the amount of $625,000 over the next five years. Among the twenty-five individuals selected by the MacArthur Foundation from across a variety of fields and disciplines, Diaz, Keene, and Link were given the grants “to pursue their own creative, intellectual, and professional inclinations.”

About Diaz, whose most recent collection is When My Brother Was an Aztec (Copper Canyon Press, 2012), the MacArthur Foundation wrote, “Diaz is a powerful new poetic voice, and she is broadening the venues for and reach of Indigenous perspectives through her teaching, cross-disciplinary collaborations, and language preservation efforts.” Diaz teaches at Arizona State University.

The MacArthur Foundation described Keene, who teaches at Rutgers University and is the author of Counternarratives (New Directions, 2015), as a writer who “imbues with multifaceted subjectivities those who have been denied nuanced histories within the story of the Americas—primarily people of color and queer people—and exposes the social structures that confine, enslave, or destroy them.”

Link’s fiction, according to the MacArthur Foundation, “pushes the boundaries of literary fiction in works that combine the surreal and fantastical with the concerns and emotional realism of contemporary life.” Her most recent collection of stories is Get in Trouble (Random House, 2015).

Potential fellows are nominated by external parties, and then are selected by a committee that the MacArthur Foundation keeps anonymous. Between twenty and thirty recipients are awarded grants each year.

Photo Credit: John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation