MacArthur will give 25 new fellows $625,000 each to pursue ‘high-risk, high-reward’ work

September 28, 2021

By Ellen McCarthy,

John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

Reginald Dwayne Betts, a poet and lawyer, is a 2021 MacArthur Fellow.

Reginald Dwayne Betts was at home in New Haven, Conn., when his phone rang with a number he didn’t recognize. The stranger on the other end of the line asked if he was alone. Betts replied that his two sons were downstairs. The stranger told him to shut the door.

He felt like a guileless victim in a horror movie, but followed instructions. Once he was safely sealed off from his family, the voice on the phone revealed the twist: The 40-year-old poet and advocate for incarcerated people — Betts used to be one — had been chosen as a 2021 MacArthur Fellow. The honor comes with a $625,000 stipend, paid out over five years, to use however he sees fit.

Betts was speechless.

“Did you expect this?’ ” he remembers the voice asking. That’s when he started laughing.

“How can you expect something like this?” Betts told The Washington Post in an interview.

He added: “The phone number they called me on is the same number I got on the day I came home from prison.”

Betts is one of 25 Americans who received similar calls from staffers at the Chicago-based John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Known colloquially as “genius” grants, the fellowships are designed to “encourage people of outstanding talent to pursue their own creative, intellectual, and professional inclinations.” The process of choosing each year’s fellows is highly secretive, with experts from a cross-section of professions asked to nominate colleagues who are doing cutting-edge work. Nominees are given no notice that they’re even being considered for an award until they’re congratulated.

Betts, who grew up in Suitland, Md., intended to become an engineer. But before he finished high school he was sentenced to nine years in prison for a carjacking he and a friend committed when he was 16. While serving time he encountered a book of poetry by Black writers that convinced him of the genre’s power. Since his release he’s published three collections of poetry and a memoir, graduated from Yale Law School and served on the Obama administration’s Council on Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. He recently started a nonprofit organization to build prison libraries and deliver millions of books to incarcerated people.

[Reginald Dwayne Betts: From Inmate to Mentor, Through Power of Books]

“I hope that what I can do for some other folks is show them that somebody cares about their existence,” Betts says.

Other members of this year’s class of fellows includes a painter, a music critic, a cellular biophysicist, a choreographer and a geomorphologist — that would be someone who studies the processes that create a planet’s landforms, in this case J. Taylor Perron, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Perhaps best-known among the recipients is Ibram X. Kendi, a historian and author of the best-selling books, “How to Be an Antiracist” and “Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America.”

[The Anti-Racist Revelations of Ibram X. Kendi]

Trevor Bedford, another new fellow, is a computational virologist who creates tools to help track the evolution of viruses. The past two years have been “cycles of overwork and burnout,” Bedford says of his efforts to analyze and track samples of the virus that causes covid-19. The MacArthur Foundation credits him with creating a “critical source of information about the genetic origins of divergent strains of the virus.”

John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

Trevor Bedford, a computational virologist who creates tools to help track the evolution of viruses, is another 2021 MacArthur Fellow.

“I don’t know how to feel,” he told The Post from his home in Seattle. “The only reason any of this is happening is because of the pandemic, and it can feel like this is me getting these awards on top of millions of people. So it’s hard for it to be, like, a good thing by itself.”

Michelle Monje, a neurologist and neuro-oncologist who specializes in pediatric brain cancers, felt her stomach sink when her phone rang and she saw a number pop up with a Chicago area code; she has a patient in Chicago, and feared the worst.

Monje was a medical student 20 years ago when she first encountered a patient with a particularly lethal form of pediatric brain cancer. “I took care of this child from the time of her diagnosis and until her death a few months later. And I was horrified by what it does to children, to families,” she says. “And I have just been unable to turn away from it since then.”

In addition to treating patients, Monje established her own lab that has pioneered research of the disease and created a potential treatment that is now in clinical trials.

“I’m going to need to do some high-risk, high-reward kinds of things in order to really make the next big steps forward,” she says, “and I feel like this award will help me to do that.”

John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

Michelle Monje, a neurologist and neuro-oncologist who specializes in pediatric brain cancers, received a MacArthur fellowship.

Cristina Ibarra and Alex Rivera are a married pair of filmmakers who thought they were hopping on a call with a MacArthur Foundation staff member to talk about the underrepresentation of Latinos in the film industry. Soon, though, it became apparent that the pretext was a ruse. Then it became apparent that they’d won not one fellowship but two — a “genius” grant for each of them.

“There are things you dream of, but two MacArthur fellowships in the house is not one of them,” says Rivera. “I never, never dreamed of that.”

Ibarra and Rivera have largely worked on separate, but parallel, filmmaking tracks; Ibarra has made mostly documentaries, while Rivera has focused on feature films. Both make films that explore life along the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and the experiences of immigrants. In 2010 they began collaborating on a project that wove together documentary and scripted filmmaking styles to create a movie titled “The Infiltrators,” which tells the story of a group of young undocumented activists trying to stop the deportation of other immigrants from inside a for-profit detention center. The movie won multiple awards at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.

[Part documentary, part thriller, ‘The Infiltrators’ is a tense, politically engaged drama]

But, Rivera says, “there’s a reason it takes us seven or 10 years to make a movie”: relatively few sources of investment. While 1 in every 5 Americans is Latino, he says, only 1 in every 50 filmmakers is Latino. “Our ecosystem of filmmakers has been shrinking. So it’s a field in which, just proportionately, there’s just extremely little support.”

They’re hoping that the award can help spark awareness of not just their projects but of the art being created by their fellow Latino filmmakers. “We feel it as a kind of responsibility because we believe there are others who deserve to feel free and supported in doing the necessary work, ” says Ibarra.

John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

Cristina Ibarra and her husband, Alex Rivera, were both selected as MacArthur fellows.

John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

Alex Rivera collaborated with his wife, Cristina Ibarra, on “The Infiltrators,” a film about a group of young undocumented activists.

The 2021 grant recipients were notified weeks ago but sworn to secrecy until Tuesday’s announcement of the awards. As a rule, each winner is permitted to tell only one confidant.

Betts, the poet and advocate for incarcerated people, said that in some ways the period between getting the call and celebrating the announcement was the inverse of what he felt while waiting to be sentenced for his crime, as a teenager. With a prison sentence, “You don’t want to tell people,” he explained. “Here, I want to tell people, but I can’t.”

Another parallel: Neither a prison sentence nor a “genius” grant should define a person. “Jail doesn’t mean you’re a horrible person,” Betts says. “And this grant doesn’t mean that my nickname should be Einstein.”

“But,” he added, “it does mean something.”

Full list of 2021 MacArthur fellows:

●Hanif Abdurraqib, 38, music critic, essayist and poet.

●Daniel Alarcón, 44, writer and radio producer.

●Marcella Alsan, 44, physician-economist.

●Trevor Bedford, 39, computational virologist.

●Reginald Dwayne Betts, 40, poet and lawyer.

●Jordan Casteel, 32, painter.

●Don Mee Choi, 59, poet and translator.

●Ibrahim Cissé , 38, cellular biophysicist.

●Nicole Fleetwood, 48, art historian and curator.

●Cristina Ibarra, 49, documentary filmmaker.