MacArthur Fellow

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Gimbling in the Wabe – It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Gene Luen Yang!

Published on : 30 September, 201629 September, 2016 Published by : Sharon Browning

Okay, I have to admit, I find last week’s announcement of the 2016 MacArthur Fellows (and their subsequent awarding of the generous – to the tune of $625,000-no-strings-attached generous – Genius Grants) to be incredibly exciting. One expects microbiologists, computer scientists, human rights lawyers, chemists, and the like to be […]

Six Diverse Writers Are Named 2016 MacArthur Fellows

Published on : 27 September, 201626 September, 2016 Published by : Sharon Browning

Poet Claudine Rankine, writer Maggie Nelson, artist and writer Lauren Redniss, “long form” journalist Sarah Stillman, graphic novelist and comic book writer Gene Luen Yang, and playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins were named as 2016 MacArthur Fellows (along with 17 other “extraordinary individuals” in such diverse disciplines as linguistics, microbiology, computer science, […]

On this day, October 30, in 1885, poet Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho. As a young child, he already knew he was destined to be a poet; he attended university at age 15 and moved overseas at age 23. While in London and Paris he was editor of multiple literary magazines, championing the careers of such notables as T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Robert Frost and Ernest Hemingway. His poetry promoted a modernist aesthetic, focusing on clarity and simplicity rather than flowery language and superlatives. A complicated man (he was charged with treason in the US, and spent 12 years confined to a mental hospital), he died in 1972 in Venice at the age of 87.

On this day, December 3, in 1857, Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Imperial Russia (modern
Ukraine, then a part of Poland). While he settled in England and wrote in English, he always considered himself a Pole. Heart of Darkness, one of the most famous of his 20 novels (which explores colonialism and the attitudes regarding what constitutes a barbarian versus civilized society) is considered one of the best English novels of the 20th century, as is his novel Lord Jim, which chronicles a crew’s abandonment of its disabled ship. Conrad died in England in 1924 at age 66.

Gimbling in the Wabe – It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Gene Luen Yang!

Six Diverse Writers Are Named 2016 MacArthur Fellows

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