CHICAGO (AP) — A poet who explores themes of racism, family, love and faith with a variety of styles that bore straight to the heart of the subject and a professor whose research is helping a California police department improve its strained relationship with the Black community are among the 21 winners of this year’s MacArthur Foundation “genius grants.”
The Chicago-based John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced on Wednesday the 2014 recipients, who will each receive $625,000 to spend any way they like.
The poet and professor, part of an eclectic group that also includes scientists, mathematicians, historians, a cartoonist and a composer, are among several recipients whose work involves topics that have dominated the news in the past year.
“I think getting this (grant) speaks to people’s sense that this is the kind of work that needs to be done,” said recipient Jennifer Eberhardt, a Stanford University social psychologist who has researched racial stereotypes and crime.
Critically acclaimed poet Terrance Hayes’ most recent poetry collection is Lighthead (Penguin 2010), winner of the 2010 National Book Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and Hurston-Wright award. A review of Lighthead in the New York Times stated: “Hayes’s fourth book puts invincibly restless wordplay at the service of strong emotions.”
Hayes’ other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a profile on the PBS Newshour with Jim Leher, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.
His first book, Muscular Music (Tia Chucha Press, 1999) won both a Whiting Writers Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. His second book, Hip Logic (Penguin 2002), was a National Poetry Series selection, and a finalist for both the Los Angeles Time Book Award and the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Wind In a Box (Penguin 2006), a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award finalist, was named one of the best books of 2006 by Publishers Weekly, whose reviewer wrote: “in his hip, funny, yet no less high-stakes third collection, Hayes solidifies his reputation as one of the best poets – African American or otherwise – now writing.”
Hayes’ poems have appeared in seven editions of the Best American Poetry anthology (“New Jersey Poem” in 2013, “The Rose Has Teeth” in 2012, “Lighthead’s Guide to the Galaxy” in 2011, “I Just Want to Look” in 2010, “A House is Not A Home” in 2009, “Talk” in 2006, and “Variations on Two Black Cinema Treasures” in 2005) and two editions of the Pushcart Best of the Small Presses anthology poetry (“Model Prison Model” in 2010 and “Tour Daufuskie” in 2004).
He has read his poetry and lectured in venues that include Carnegie Hall, the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Princeton University, Yale University, The Boys Club of New York, and the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival.
He has visited high schools and also conducted poetry workshops at prisons across America. He is a member of the President’s Committee on the Arts & Humanities National Student Poets Program and a contributing editor for jubilat magazine.
Hayes was born in Columbia, South Carolina in 1971, and educated at Coker College where he studied painting and English and was an Academic All-American on the men’s basketball team. After receiving his MFA from the University of Pittsburgh in 1997, he taught in southern Japan, Columbus, Ohio, and New Orleans, Louisiana.
Hayes returned to Pittsburgh in 2001 and taught for twelve years at Carnegie Mellon University. He joined the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh as a full professor of English in the fall of 2013. How To Be Drawn, his new collection of poems, is forthcoming from Penguin in 2015.
Eberhart’s work prompted the Oakland, California, police department to ask for her help studying racial biases among its officers and how those biases play out on the street — topics that have been debated nationally in the wake of the police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed Black 18-year-old in Missouri. Eberhardt, who is also studying the use of body cameras by police — another topic of particular interest since Brown’s shooting — said, “I hope this will show the work matters, holds value and promotes social change.”
Shrouded in secrecy, the selection process involves nominations from anonymous groups and recommendations from the foundation’s board of directors. Recipients have no idea they’ve won until they get a call from the foundation, and even then recipients have been known to wonder initially if someone is trying to trick them.
John Henneberger, a housing advocate in Texas, said he was so stunned when he got his call that he had to sit down.
“I got really quiet and they (people he was with) were asking me, ‘Did somebody die?” he said.
The justice system is also at the heart of Sarah Deer’s work as a legal scholar and advocate for Native American women living on reservations, who suffer higher-than-average rates of domestic abuse and sexual violence.
Deer, a Native American who teaches law in Minnesota, met with women who simply stopped reporting such attacks because their tribal governments had been stripped of the authority to investigate and because federal authorities were often unwilling to do so, she said. The foundation pointed to her instrumental role in reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act by Congress in 2013 that restored some of those abilities to tribes.
“For the first time since 1978 … tribes (can) prosecute non-Indians who have committed acts of sexual assault and domestic violence on reservations,” she said.
Like Deer, fellow recipient Jonathan Rapping has worked to improve the lives of others.
A former public defender, Rapping founded Gideon’s Promise after seeing a legal system that he said valued speed over quality representation of the indigent. The organization trains, mentors and assists public defenders to help them withstand the intense pressure that can come with massive caseloads.
Today, the program that began in 2007 for 16 attorneys in two offices in Georgia and Louisiana has more than 300 participants in 15 states.
The foundation recognized Khaled Mattawa, an associate professor at the University of Michigan, for his poetry and translations of Arab contemporary poets.
Mattawa, who said he started translating the poetry as way to teach himself to write poetry, said the work can connect people from different cultures. “The poets are bearing witness not only to the humanity of their own people but of a shared humanity,” he said.
The awards, given annually since 1981, are doled out over a five-year period. This year’s class brings the number of recipients to more than 900.
Most winners are not widely known outside their fields, but the list has over the years included writer Susan Sontag and filmmaker John Sayles.
See complete list of recipients on next page.
The New Pittsburgh Courier Newsroom contributed to this story. Terrance Hayes bio information from terrancehayes.com/
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