MacArthur Loves All Over the Writers!

Such good morning news! Fiction writers Edwidge Danticat and Deborah Eisenberg, along with poet Heather McHugh, are among this year's crop of MacArthur Fellows. You know--the people who suddenly get a call saying they've been awarded $500,000. No application. No strings attached.

And these writers are solid picks. McHugh teaches in the MFA program I attended and she has the sort of joyful brilliance that would leave students struggling as we giggled at her antics at the same time as our jaws were dropped in awe. She is insightful, curious, passionate, and kinetic.

One of her recent MFA classes garnered a lot of attention even for her: check out "Lines of the Hand." Also worth your attention: Matthea Harvey's interview with McHugh in BOMB Magazine.

Eisenberg specializes in short stories, and is the kind of writer whose books are passed from person to person, or discovered on reading lists, a slowly uncovered favorite. Writers turn to her stories again and again to learn how to create power and substance in fiction, about dialogue and detail, about narration and distance.

For more from Eisenberg, check out her piece, "Becoming Susan Sontag" in The New York Review of Books; a profile of her in The New York Times upon the publication of her fifth story collection; and The Quarterly Conversation's review of Eisenberg's Twilight of the Superheroes.

Edwidge Danticat was born in Haiti and lives in Miami. The well-regarded writer has steadily built her reputation since 1994's publication of Breath, Eyes, Memory (which was an Oprah's Book Club pick). Since then, Danticat's steady writing has produced Krik? Krak!; The Farming of Bones, and her book of linked stories, The Dew Breaker. 

See more of what Danticat has to say in her interview with Robert Birnbaum in The Morning News. She also spoke with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! after her 81-year-old uncle died in an immigration detention facility--a story Danticat told in her award-winning memoir, Brother, I'm Dying.

UPDATE: I'd be remiss if I didn't also also give props to the investigative journalists who got the MacArthur nod.

Jerry Mitchell, for example, who has done incredible civil rights journalism for The Clarion-Ledger newspaper of Mississippi. His hardcore reporting has brought accountability and closure to murders from the 1960s; his work put four Klansman behind bars, including the man who ordered the assassination of Medgar Evers; the man who bombed the Birmingham church that killed four girls; and the man who helped organize the "Mississippi Burning" killings of three civil rights workers: James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.

According to The Clarion-Ledger, Mitchell "continues to collect other possible evidence. Four suspects are alive in the Mississippi Burning killings, including Olen Burrage, who owned the property where the trio’s bodies were buried."

His work has angered more than a few people. The FBI is currently investigating death threats made to Mitchell.

Also honored was photojournalist Lynsey Addario, who is based in Istanbul. She has pointed her lens--and thus, the world's eyes--to the most brutal humanitarian crises of our age. From Darfur to Iraq to Afghanistan and the epidemic of rape in the Congo, Addario is, according to the MacArthur folks, able to "reveal both the cruelties that have been perpetrated as well as the dignity and humanity of the victims. ... A regular theme in Addario’s work is capturing the lives of women in male-dominated societies."

Addario's images of gender-based violence in the Congo are now part of a traveling exhibition that is intended to heighten awareness--and action--around the world. Her work has been exhibited in national and international museums, and been published in the major print newspapers, as well as National Geographic, Harpers, and many others.