Tommy Orange, author of There There (2018) and Wandering Stars (2024), has been named one of 22 recipients of this year's MacArthur Foundation "genius" grants. Each MacArthur Fellow receives a no-strings-attached, $800,000 award.
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| Tommy Orange | |
The foundation lauded Orange as "a fiction writer capturing a diverse range of Native American experiences and lives in novels that traverse time, space, and narrative perspectives. Orange's novels center his characters' interior lives: their emotions, ideas, and realizations in moments of joy and pain. Through expansive casts of interconnected characters, he shows the many ways historical trauma and dislocation can rupture the fabric of everyday life....
"In both of Orange's novels, hope is subtle yet persistent. It is buried under the weight of history in his characters' search for connection, meaning, and a way forward. Through sweeping storytelling married to an intimate focus on interiority, Orange illuminates the richness and depth of contemporary Native American life."
Other writers receiving MacArthur fellowships this year include:
Hahrie Han, "a political scientist addressing critical questions about how and why people participate in civic and political life. Employing a range of ethnographic, sociological, experimental, and quantitative methods, she examines organizational structures and tactics that encourage individuals to interact across lines of difference and work together for change in the public sphere."
Han's books include Moved to Action: Motivation, Participation, and Inequality in American Politics (2009), How Organizations Develop Activists: Civic Associations and Leadership in the 21st Century (2014), and Undivided: The Quest for Racial Solidarity in an American Church (2024).
Ieva Jusionyte, "a cultural anthropologist exploring the political and moral ambiguities of border regions, where state policies regulate historically shifting distinctions between legal and illegal practices. Her ethnographic accounts are based on years of fieldwork and immersion among people whose occupations give them frontline vantage points on the ways border policies play out in the lives of individuals and communities. From these rarely observed perspectives, Jusionyte reveals how security mechanisms and cycles of violence perpetuate states of emergency and social fracture."
Jusionyte's books include Savage Frontier: Making News and Security on the Argentine Border (2015), Threshold: Emergency Responders on the U.S.-Mexico Border (2018), and Exit Wounds: How America's Guns Fuel Violence Across the Border (2024).