At least three Asian Americans are among the 22 MacArthur Genius fellowship winners named this week.
Each fellow will receive $800,000 with no restrictions to award them for exceptional work they have done in their creative endeavors.
This year’s winners include Alice Wong, a disability advocate based in San Francisco; Shailaja Paik, a researcher at the University of Cincinnati studying caste discrimination against Dalit women; and Lynn Ma, a fiction writer from the University of Chicago.
“I am amazed that strangers who have read my work decided to nominate or recommend my fiction,” Ma said in a statement released by her university. “For someone who spends most of their days alone, that’s pretty unbelievable.”
Ma is best known for merging the mundane of everyday life with fantasy. Previous awards include the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Kirkus Prize and the Whiting Award for her short story collection, Bliss Montage.
The Foundation honored Paik for her work bringing attention to caste discrimination particularly among Dalit women, denying them dignity and individuality.
According to mathrubhumi.com, Paik is from the Dalit community and grew up in a slum. Yet her father’s love for education inspired her to complete both a master’s degree and PhD in South Asian history.
“We can provide new ways to think about universal humanity and universal emancipation,” she once said in an interview.
Wong is a staunch advocate for the disabled community and describes herself in a social media profile as a “disabled oracle” and editor of the Disability Visibility Project.
“Hard to believe but I am a 2024 @macfound Fellow!” she declared on X. “I am accepting the MacArthur Fellowship amidst the genocide happening in Gaza and indiscriminate terroristic attacks in Lebanon by the state of Israel on the 76th year of their occupation of Palestine.”
KQED reports she was born with a progressive neuromuscular disability and is a fierce fighter against discrimination faced by members of her community.
You can read about all 22 MacArthur Genius Grant winners here.
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