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This year’s “Genius grant” winners have been announced. The MacArthur grant awards $625,000 “no strings attached” to “talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.” Alongside scientists, artists and scholars are some newly minted geniuses with a literary focus. This year’s literary geniuses are:
Alison Bechdel may now be as well known for her “Bechdel Test“, a checklist for evaluating gender bias in movies, as she is for her genre-making graphic memoirs Fun Home and Are You My Mother? Bechdel first came to prominence via her long-running comic Dykes to Watch Out For, collected a few years back in The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For. MacArthur calls her “a cartoonist and graphic memoirist exploring the complexities of familial relationships in multilayered works that use the interplay of word and image to weave sophisticated narratives.”
MacArthur did not honor any writers of fiction this year but several others in literary fields made the cut, including poet Terrence Hayes, whose Lighthead won the 2010 National Book Award; Samuel D. Hunter, a playwright best known for The Whale, a riff on Moby-Dick; and Khaled Mattawa, translator and poet, known for his work on Dinarzad’s Children: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Fiction, as well as his own collections of poetry.