Among the 25 winners of the 2018 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowships (widely referred to as the "genius grants," which come with a no-strings-attached award of $625,000) are at least six people who are writers or story-tellers:
- Natalie Diaz, 40, a poet who teaches at Arizona State University.
- John Keene, 53, a writer in the Department of African American and African Studies at Rutgers University.
- Kelly Link, 49, a fiction writer in Northampton, Mass.
- Dominique Morisseau, 40, a playwright at Signature Theatre in New York City.
- Ken Ward Jr., 50, an investigative journalist with the Charleston Gazette-Mail.M
- Raj Jayadev, 43, a community organizer and co-founder of Silicon Valley De-Bug, a story-telling, community organizing, and advocacy organization.
