The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation recently announced the 22 latest recipients in its fellowship program, commonly referred to as “genius grants.” MacArthur fellows receive a grant of $800,000 over five years to spend however they want on their academic or creative endeavors. Winners have shown exceptional creativity in their work and the promise to do more.
Of this year’s 22 winners, seven are Black scholars with ties to the academic world.
Ruha Benjamin is the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and the founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab. Dr. Benjamin is a transdisciplinary scholar and writer illuminating how advances in science, medicine, and technology reflect and reproduce social inequality. She is the author of several books including Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Polity, 2019).
Professor Benjamin received a bachelor’s degree from Spelman College in Atlanta. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.
Jericho Brown is the the Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University in Atlanta. Previously, he served as an assistant professor of English at the University of San Diego from 2007 to 2012. Dr. Brown is the author of several collections of poetry and is the editor of How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill (Amistad, 2023).
Professor Brown is a graduate of Dillard University in New Orleans. He holds a master of fine arts degree from the University of New Orleans, and a Ph.D. from the University of Houston.
Tony Cokes is a professor in the department of modern culture and media at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Professor Cokes is a media artist creating video works that recontextualize historical and cultural moments. Through his unique melding of artistic practice and media analysis, Professor Cokes shows the discordant ways media color our understanding and demonstrates the artist’s power to bring clarity and nuance to how we see events, people, and histories.
Professor Cokes holds a bachelor’s degree from Goddard College in Maryland and a master of fine arts degree from Virginia Commonwealth University.
Jennifer L. Morgan is a professor in the department of social and cultural analysis at New York University. She ia the author of Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) and Reckoning With Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Duke University Press, 2021).
Dr. Morgan is a graduate of Oberlin College in Ohio. She holds a Ph.D. from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
Ebony G. Patterson is a multimedia artist creating intricate, densely layered, and visually dazzling works that center the culture and aesthetics of postcolonial spaces. Patterson’s practice includes painting, photography, video, performance, sculpture, textiles, and installation. She has taught at the University of Virginia, Edna Manley College in Kingston, Jamaica, the University of Kentucky, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Patterson received a bachelor of fine arts degree from Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts and a master of fine arts degree from the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.
Jason Reynolds is a writer of children’s and young adult literature whose books reflect the rich inner lives of kids of color He is on the faculty of the Writing for Young People MFA Program at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 2020 to 2022, he served as the Library of Congress’s National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. He has authored and co-authored more than 20 books, including his latest work Twenty-Four Seconds From Now (Antheneum, 2024).
Reynolds holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Maryland.
Dorothy Roberts is a legal scholar and public policy researcher exposing racial inequities embedded within health and social service systems. She is the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, the Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at the university’s law school, and holds faculty appointments in the departments of Africana studies and sociology. Professor Roberts’ work encompasses reproductive health, bioethics, and child welfare. She is the author of several books including Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families — and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (Basic Books, 2022).
Professor Roberts is a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School.
