Yale Poetry Professor, Stamford Writer Receive MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grants

Yale Poetry Prof. Claudia Rankine and artist-writer Lauren Redniss, who grew up in Stamford, are among this year’s recipients of John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowships.

Announced Sept. 22, the fellowships, nicknamed “genius grants,” are no-strings-attached grants of $625,000, paid out over five years, based on “exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishment, and potential for the fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work,” according to the foundation’s website. Twenty-three people received fellowships this year.

This is the second year in a row that a person with Connecticut connections has won the grant. Last year, Wesleyan grad Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator of the Broadway musical “Hamilton,” was honored.

Redniss, who teaches illustration at Parsons, the New School for Design, lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Rankine, who was born in Kingston, Jamaica, is in her first semester of teaching at Yale, where she is the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry in the Departments of English and African American Studies. Previously, she was at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif. She is currently shopping for a home in New Haven.

In a phone interview, Rankine said she hopes the visibility of the award brings attention to the recurring subject matter of her work: “How do we dismantle white dominance in American culture?”

“Obviously the MacArthur is good for me in terms of level of recognition, but it really only can be useful if it can create a better structure for all of us to live in,” Rankine, 53, said. “Part of me is excited about the ability to bring attention to what everybody knows is a problem.”

Rankine received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry for her 2014 volume “Citizen: An American Lyric,” the first book in that award’s history to be nominated in two categories: poetry and criticism. “Citizen” is a collection of observations, from Rankine’s life and the lives of friends and colleagues, “of moments when they were trying to go about their ordinary course of business and racism came in and disrupted the flow of those moments,” she said.

The MacArthur Foundation, in announcing Rankine’s fellowship, commented on “Citizen”: “The indeterminacy of the ‘you’ in the poems, which puts the reader in the position of both victim and perpetrator, combined with the taut, linguistic compression of Rankine’s verse, convey the heavy toll that the accumulation of these day-to-day encounters exact on black Americans.”

Rankine also wrote “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric,” “The End of the Alphabet,” “Plot” and “Nothing in Nature is Private” and co-wrote the essay collection “The Racial Imaginary.” She is adapting “Citizen” for stage, in collaboration with Arts Emerson, and is organizing The Racial Imaginary Institute. “It’ll be an institute where artists and thinkers will be invested in dismantling white dominance through their work,” Rankine said.

Redniss is the author of “Century Girl,” a biography of a Ziegfeld girl who lived to be 106; “Radioactive,” a biography of scientists Marie and Pierre Curie; and “Thunder and Lightning,” a study of the significance of weather on human history. Redniss writes the books, as well as illustrates them in ways that enhance the text, lays them out and creates fonts that enhance the mood she wants to convey.

“I call it visual nonfiction. I don’t want the artwork to just be an illustration of the text. It works in combination with the text. It’s a fusion of the two forms that tell the story,” Redniss said in a phone interview. “I use words and images in a whole spectrum of ways to create a kind of blending of facts and feeling that can transport a reader.”

The foundation stated “Redniss’s unique approach to visual storytelling enriches the ways in which stories can be conveyed, experienced and understood.”

The other 2106 MacArthur fellows are Los Angeles human rights lawyer Ahilan Arulanantham, Ohio linguist and cultural preservationist Daryl Baldwin, Milwaukee theater artist-educator Anne Basting, San Francisco sculptor Vincent Fecteau, New York playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, New York art historian-curator Kellie Jones, New York theoretical computer scientist Subhash Khot, Los Angeles cultural historian Josh Kun, CalArts writer Maggie Nelson, CalTech microbiologist Dianne Newman, CalTech geobiologist Victoria Orphan, Stanford physical biologist-inventor Manu Prakash, San Francisco financial-services innovator José A. Quiñonez, New York video artist Mary Reid Kelley, Houston bioengineer Rebecca Richards-Kortum, Baltimore jewelry maker-sculptor Joyce J. Scott, New Yorker journalist Sarah Stillman, Microsoft researcher Bill Thies, NYU composer Julia Wolfe, San Jose graphic novelist Gene Luen Yang and California synthetic chemist Jin-Quan Yu.