MacArthur Fellows Include Alison Bechdel, Terrance Hayes

Shelf Awareness

Alison Bechdel

Congratulations to Alison Bechdel, Terrance Hayes, Khaled Mattawa, Tara Zahra, Pamela O. Long and Samuel D. Hunter, who were among the 21 recipients of this year's MacArthur Fellow grants, better known as the MacArthur genius awards. The grants are for $625,000 over five years to use however the winners choose.

Bechdel is a cartoonist and graphic memoirist whose works include the long-running comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For (1983–2008), as well as book-length graphic memoirs Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic and Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama.

Poet Hayes has published several collections, including Wind in a Box, Lighthead, Muscular Music, Hip Logic and the forthcoming How to Be Drawn.

Translator and poet Mattawa has published English translations of a number of contemporary poets in the Arab world. His most recent book is Mahmoud Darwish: The Poet's Art and His Nation.

Historian of modern Europe Zahra wrote Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1948 and The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe's Families after World War II.

Science and technology historian Long wrote Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance & Artisan/Practitioners and The Rise of the New Sciences, 1400-1600.

Playwright Hunter premiered three new works during the 2013–2014 season--The Few, Rest and A Great Wilderness. He also wrote A Bright New Boise and In the Whale.