Once more, the MacArthur Foundation proves itself to have a solid appreciation for writers and language enthusiasts, though perhaps not with as much brim and vigor as last year. (Deborah Eisenberg, Edwidge Danticat, and Heather McHugh, as well as journalist Jerry Mitchell, were among the 2009 team of awesomeness.) In 2010, here are the talented writerly folks whose life work won them an unexpected offer of $500,000 of no-strings-attached funds over the next five years.
Yiyun Li writes fiction in her second language and teaches at the Unviersity of California at Davis. She came to the United States from China in 1996 to earn a graduate degree in immunology at the University of Iowa--though, after she took her M.S. in 2000, she turned her attention to the school's Writers Workshop, from which she graduated in 2005. Li is the author primarily of story collections, including A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and the brand-new Gold Boy, Emerald Girl. She also wrote last year's novel, The Vagrants. Says the MacArthur Foundation of Li's work:
Li is a fiction writer whose spare and quietly understated style of storytelling draws readers into powerful and emotionally compelling explorations of her characters’ struggles, set both in China and the United States. ... (she) crafts deeply moving fiction that offers Western readers a window into unfamiliar worlds as well as insights into human nature that transcend ethnicity and place.
Jessie Little Doe Baird is a linguist devoted to preserving Native American languages -- particularly Wampanoag (Wôpanâak), the Algonquian language of her ancestors, that went silent for years after the community of tens of thousands was fragmented by Puritan settlers. Starting in the nineteenth century, according to the MacArthur Foundation, it only existed as a written language. The Foundation describes Baird's work to revive it:
Determined to breathe life back into the language, Baird founded the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project, an intertribal effort that aims to return fluency to the Wampanoag Nation. She undertook graduate training in linguistics and language pedagogy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she worked ... to decipher grammatical patterns and compile vocabulary lists from archival Wampanoag documents. By turning to related Algonquian languages for guidance with pronunciation and grammar, this collaboration produced a 10,000-word Wampanoag-English dictionary, which Baird continues to develop into an essential resource ... In addition to achieving fluency herself, she has adapted her scholarly work into accessible teaching materials for adults and children and leads a range of educational programs—after-school classes for youth, beginning and advanced courses for adults, and summer immersion camps for all ages—with the goal of establishing a broad base of Wampanoag speakers. Through painstaking research, dedicated teaching, and contributions to other groups struggling with language preservation, Baird is reclaiming the rich linguistic traditions of indigenous peoples and preserving precious links to our nation’s complex past.
Annette Gordon-Reed is a historian, legal scholar, and the author of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy and The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. Her investigations were the first to nail down the suspected relationship between former President Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, the woman who was his slave. Indeed, the conclusions of her first book, which was published in 1997, was confirmed by DNA testing of Jefferson's paternity a year later. Gordon-Reed is a graduate of Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School, and now teaches at New York Law School and at Rutgers. You can see her talk about law, race, and politics over at Big Think. Says the Foundation on her work:
(Her) persistent investigation into the life of an iconic American president has dramatically changed the course of Jeffersonian scholarship ... In disentangling the complicated history of two distinct founding families’ interracial bloodlines, Gordon-Reed is shaping and enriching American history with an authentic portrayal of our colonial past.
Carol Padden is a linguist who specializes in the structures and nuances of sign languages, including the grammer of visual space in both American Sign Language and emerging sign languages from around the world. She has a special interest in the cultural context of these languages, including how they are acquired and adapted differently in communities that are insular or porous. She is a graduate of Georgetown University and the University of California San Diego, where she now teaches. Padden is the author of Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture, Inside Deaf Culture, and two textbooks on American Sign Language. Here is the MacArthur Foundation on her work:
(Padden) writes extensively about historical factors impacting the development and use of sign language, contemporary obstacles to interaction and integration of deaf culture within larger society, and the underappreciated heterogeneity within deaf cultures (such as the different ways in which deaf people learn sign language and interact with other deaf people). Through her fundamental linguistics research and her reflections on the relationship between language and culture, Padden demystifies sign language and opens windows of understanding regarding how languages evolve over time and the role of language in building and maintaining communities.
David Simon is a crime beat reporter turned author and screenwriter. The famed force behind "The Wire" and "Treme" is also the author of Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets and The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood. He graduated from the University of Maryland, College Park. Here's what MacArthur says about him and his work:
With the nuance and scope of novels, Simon’s recent series have explored the constraints that poverty, corruption, and broken social systems place on the lives of a compelling cast of characters, each vividly realized with complicated motives, frailties, and strengths. ... Through his nonfiction accounts and television dramas, Simon creates riveting stories that engage wide-ranging audiences and confront some of the most daunting challenges facing America’s urban centers.
See the full list of the twenty-three new MacArthur Fellows (including a type designer, who I came close to including on this particular list) here. And please, somebody ask me next year who I think would be excellent candidates for next year's MacArthur fellowships. I have loads of nominees, from Melissa Harris-Lacewell to Scott McCloud to David Small to Dana Priest to Amy Hempel to Natalie Angier.
Image Credits: The MacArthur Foundation
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