MacArthur Foundation Announces 21 ‘Genius’ Grant Winners

When MacArthur called, N. K. Jemisin figured it was spam.

She had been getting a lot of those kinds of calls lately — peddling car insurance and such — so she didn’t pick up. It took a text from someone at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to make her realize that she needed to answer the phone.

“I was delighted, excited, shocked, a whole bunch of other adjectives,” Ms. Jemisin, a speculative-fiction writer, said of her reaction after being told that she had been selected for a MacArthur fellowship.

Ms. Jemisin is no stranger to receiving major, career-altering awards. In 2016, she became the first African-American woman to win a Hugo Award for best novel (for the first book in her Broken Earth trilogy). Then, in 2018, she became the first author to win a Hugo for every novel in a trilogy. But this award, with its no-strings-attached grant of $625,000, has the potential to fundamentally change her writing process.

Ms. Jemisin, 48, said she typically writes under contract, meaning that her books are held to an agreed-upon timeline. But with the financial freedom that the grant offers, she said that she now has the option to forgo those strictures and write on her own schedule.