Front-Row Seats for a Lineup of ‘Genius’ Luminaries
Winners of the MacArthur Fellowship, nicknamed the ‘genius grant,’ are flocking to Colby to share their visionary wisdom
Over the last several years, Colby has welcomed visiting genius after visiting genius.
An environmental engineer battling the plastic crisis in our oceans. The 24th U.S. poet laureate. An Indigenous visual artist introducing the art world to the aesthetics of her community. One of America’s most important novelists. A visionary choreographer.
Each of these individuals has won a MacArthur Fellowship, also known as the “genius grant,” which is one of the nation’s most prestigious awards. The prize, which has been awarded each year since 1981 to between 20 and 30 individuals in any field who exhibit “extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction,” comes with an often life-changing, no-strings $800,000 cash prize.
On March 11th, Colby will host Ling Ma, the writer of speculative fiction, who was awarded a genius grant last year. Ma, the ninth MacArthur Fellow in recent years to visit the College, will give a reading beginning at 5 p.m. in Studio 1 of the Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts. She also will attend a creative writing class to discuss her work, which mixes deadpan, absurdist humor with the ordinary and mundane. Her fiction unsettles readers—but it also touches a chord.
“MacArthur Fellows are often interested in meeting young people,” said Tyler French, associate director of artistic planning and community engagement in Colby’s Arts Office, who has helped bring several MacArthur grant winners to the College. “And they’re interested in opportunities for connections with other courses across campus.”
Missions aligned
Ma, who is also an English professor at the University of Chicago, has already gained fans among Colby students, many of whom have a deep-rooted affection for the fantasy novels of their childhood.
“I admire Ma’s work,” said Amelia Hanscom ’27. “I’m excited to learn about the process of fiction writing from Ma and hope her artistic process breathes some inspiration into my own work this semester.”
Creative writing students have been studying Ma’s 2022 surrealistic short-story collection Bliss Montage in preparation for her visit and talk.
“I’m very excited about her writing,” said Zacamy Professor of English Debra Spark, who helped mastermind Ma’s visit. “Ma shows you can keep the world-building pleasures of the Percy Jackson or Harry Potter books students loved growing up while creating sophisticated speculative fiction that addresses issues from climate change to pandemics and drug addiction, to feelings of isolation and worthlessness. She can even write a zombie novel without cliches—that’s very hard to do.”
The genius-grant winners, according to French, have flocked to Colby quite organically. At the same time, it’s no coincidence that Colby has hosted so many of them. The goals of the MacArthur Foundation and of the College are closely aligned.
“We are looking for people who are at the top of their field and doing something different, or something particularly creative, moving in a cross-current,” French said. “This is what the MacArthur genius grant is acknowledging, and it also speaks to Colby’s focus: We are interested in identifying creative individuals who are carving out new paths for themselves.”
A shared text
Last fall, Ada Limón, the 24th U.S. poet laureate who won the genius grant in 2023, read her work on campus and visited a creative writing class. Shortly after, the renowned cartoonist Lynda Barry, a 2019 MacArthur Fellow, gave a talk about creativity. And earlier in 2024, the College hosted Colson Whitehead, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and author of The Underground Railroad, which won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2016. (Whitehead won a MacArthur Fellowship early in his career, in 2002.)
The campus was buzzing for Whitehead’s visit, and meeting such a successful author is inspirational for students, Spark said, but the benefits extend beyond giving students memorable encounters.
Visiting writers offer the community a common experience, bringing the College together around a shared piece of writing—an increasingly rare experience in a time of information overload, said Adrian Blevins, professor of English and director of the Creative Writing Program.
“We are all now reading different things, and it fragments and isolates us,” she said. “But when you bring someone to read, whether it’s Ling Ma, Ada Limón, or Colson Whitehead, you are giving the community a shared text.”
Arts and sciences
Since the 1970s, when the Creative Writing Program was founded, Colby has hosted some of the most significant writers in the country, from Gwendolyn Brooks to Raymond Carver. But the recent abundance of MacArthur Fellows, including the artist Wendy Red Star, in 2021, and the choreographer Liz Lerman, in 2023, is partly explained by the College’s decision to embed the arts even more deeply into the curriculum.
The College has hosted MacArthur Fellows in the sciences, too. Over the last couple of years, three grant winners, all from the 2022 class of geniuses, have visited the Department of Environmental Studies. In 2023, the Indigenous botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer gave a talk about traditional ecological knowledge. The ornithologist and naturalist Joseph Drew Lanham came in 2021. And last fall, environmental engineer Jenna Jambeck visited campus to introduce her work tracking how plastic gets into the oceans and how new technologies and policies can help solve the problem.
Lanham and Jambeck were both F. Russell Cole Distinguished Lecturers in Environmental Studies, a Colby program made possible through a generous donation to environmental studies by Trustee Emerita Anne Clarke Wolff ’87 and Benjamin “Ted” E. Wolff III ’86..
“Jambeck’s visit was a great success,” said Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Alejandra Ortiz, who helped organize the visit. The study of microplastics in the oceans, she said, “is an area that’s really exploded recently, and it can be a little doom and gloom—so hearing about concrete examples of success, and policy changes that are working, was really powerful, and a key part of what we were trying to provide.”
