Two MacArthur Genius Grants Awarded to Seattleites

James Longley, documentarian, and local poet Heather McHugh, are the recipients of two of the MacArthur Foundation 2009 Fellows Program grants.

Longley’s Oscar-nominated Iraq in Fragments was a cinema verité portrait of the ordinary lives of people in post-invasion Iraq. Longley is still actively filming in the Middle East--he was recently detained by police in Iran while attempting to film protests of the disputed election.

Heather McHugh has published five collections of poetry and has been published in hundreds of anthologies and journals. The Macarthur Foundation calls her work "richly layered verse that unabashedly embraces such wordplay as puns, rhymes, and syntactical twists to explore the human condition," and the Academy of American Poets calls her “on track to becoming US poet laureate. Hear some of her work.

The John D. and Katherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellows Program--or "Genius Grant"--gives out no-strings attached $500,000 fellowships to "talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction." Recent recipients of the grant include urban farmer Will Allen, music critic Alex Ross, and chemist My Hang V. Huynh.