The 2024 class of John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellows announced today includes several creators of genre interest, as well as multiple scientists.

The interdisciplinary awards announced Tuesday come with a $800,000 grant over five years that the 22 recipients may use however they want.

The complete list of grant recipients is here. 

LING MA

Ling Ma is a fiction writer mixing speculative and realist modes of storytelling to reflect on the systems that structure our lives in a globalized, capitalist era.

…The protagonist of Ma’s apocalyptic novel Severance (2018) is Candace Chen, a twenty-something Chinese American woman who is one of few survivors of a devastating fungal pathogen. Those infected with “Shen Fever,” which is believed to have originated in the manufacturing hub of Shenzhen, China, enter a zombie-like state, endlessly repeating a mundane task from their daily lives until they waste away. As Candace narrates her escape from New York City and initiation into a group of fellow survivors, she flashes backwards in time to earlier chapters in her life: her childhood in Fujian, China; her mother’s homesickness upon immigrating to the United States; and the rhythms of her publishing job as a book production coordinator in Bible manufacturing. Ma experiments with the conventions of several genres at once—zombie apocalypse, immigrant narrative, office satire, and critique of capitalism—to create a deeply affecting and unsettling novel.

The uncanny stories collected in Bliss Montage (2022) also blur genre distinctions and explore characters’ attempts to understand and be understood by others. Several stories end hauntingly with a missed epiphany or strange disappearance. The narrator of “G,” for example, becomes permanently invisible after her childhood friend (and rival) gives her a too-potent dose of a drug….

SHAMEL PITTS

Shamel Pitts is a choreographer and dancer developing multidisciplinary, performance-based works centered on collaboration and imagining new ways of being in the world.

…Pitts’s choreography is rooted in classical dance forms and Gaga—a movement language focused on dancers’ responses to their own bodily sensations—and integrates influences from contemporary dance, hip-hop, and nightlife/club culture. TRIBE’s unique way of working is akin to worldbuilding, where spatial, lighting, and sound design elements are fully integrated with the dancers’ movements into multisensory works that envelop audiences. BLACK HOLE: Trilogy and Triathlon (2022), the last of three works in Pitts’s “BLACK Series,” features three performers accompanied by original soundscapes and visual projections. In TRIBE’s hands, a black hole is not destructive but rather a source of generative energy, and the work explores the Black body coming into being through collective empowerment. Near the end of the work, the three performers are engulfed in darkness as a pulsating beat wanes. Then, in a burst of light, the trio reappears and the beat returns, growing stronger and louder in a powerful expression of reawakening….

JASON REYNOLDS

Jason Reynolds is a writer of children’s and young adult literature whose books reflect the rich inner lives of kids of color and offer profound moments of human connection.

…Long Way Down (2017), a novel in verse, follows 15-year-old Will as he rides an elevator down from his apartment. He has a gun in his waistband and is intent on avenging his brother’s murder.

Ghosts from Will’s past, each a victim of gun violence, confront him as the elevator opens on descending floors….

RUHA BENJAMIN

Ruha Benjamin is a transdisciplinary scholar and writer illuminating how advances in science, medicine, and technology reflect and reproduce social inequality. 

…Benjamin further investigates the intersection of science and society in Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019). In this work, she exposes the racial hierarchies and systems of social control embedded in seemingly neutral algorithms and automated systems that people interact with daily. These technologies, which rely on biased training data and flawed assumptions, cause direct harm to individuals and communities. Benjamin provides numerous examples of digital systems that perpetuate what she calls the “New Jim Code,” such as marketing algorithms that promote real estate based on “ethnic preferences,” thereby maintaining segregated neighborhoods, and crime prediction software that justifies intrusive surveillance of communities of color….