Kiese Laymon Wins $800,000 stipend at Rice University, Bags MacArthur Fellowship Award
Meet Kiese Laymon, a Black English professor and published author at Rice University who has received the renowned MacArthur Fellowship, also known as the “genius grant.”
He intends to utilize the $800k stipend from the “genius grant” award to concentrate on artistic links between middle school pupils in Houston and Jackson, Mississippi.
Kiese Laymon reportedly stated, “I’m not much into awards and recognition, but this one feels special,” according to Rice University News. This was done by Mississippi and revision. Simply, I’m grateful. My work was deemed acceptable by some truly remarkable people. That matters a lot to me.
Kiese Laymon is one of the few individuals selected from all over the world to get a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022.
Laymon became the Libble Shearn Moody Professor of Creative Writing and English Writing at Rice University in January 2022. After only a few months at the university’s School of Humanities, he became the first student to receive a MacArthur Fellowship, making history.
He is the second professor from Rice University to be chosen for the honor overall.
In his articles, novels, and memoirs, Kiese Laymon—a native of Jackson, Mississippi—discusses the various types of violence that characterize the Black experience.
He established the Catherine Coleman Literary Arts and Justice Initiative, which seeks to encourage Jackson’s youth to feel more at ease reading, writing, and sharing their personal narratives.
Here are a few of his well-known pieces:
Long Division, the book that took home the 2022 NAACP Image Award for fiction
How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, a collection of essays was selected as a notable book of 2021 by the New York Times.
His best-selling work Heavy, an American Memoir, was named one of The New York Times’ 50 Best Memoirs of the previous 50 years and won other accolades.
CTA on Kiese Laymon’s Sweeping Breakthrough
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