By Lawrence Specker | lspecker@al.com
Birmingham native Imani Perry has been honored with a 2023 MacArthur Fellowship, an elite honor colloquially known as the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius grants.”
The program awards unrestricted grants to “talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.” The MacArthur Foundation describes the grants as an investment in the potential of extraordinary people to benefit society. It does not set requirements for the work they produce or evaluate it.
This year’s recipients receive a no-strings attached grant of $800,000, to be paid out in quarterly installments over five years. Fellows “may use their fellowship to advance their expertise, engage in bold new work, or, if they wish, to change fields or alter the direction of their careers.”
The foundation describes Perry as “an interdisciplinary scholar and writer giving fresh context to African American social conditions and experiences along dimensions of race, gender, and politics.” It says her “nuanced and provocative reflections on historical and contemporary life span a wide range of genres and disciplines.”
“Drawing from law, literature, history, philosophy, and popular culture, Perry explores how Black Americans — and often Black women in particular — have resisted, survived, and nonetheless thrived by forging singular paths in the face of oppression and injustice,” said the MacArthur Foundation’s biography of Perry. “Her insightful connections between individual experiences, complex social obstacles, and emergent cultural expressions infuse her scholarship with an authenticity and sense of discovery that appeals to broad audiences.”
Perry’s activities include work as a professor at Harvard University and at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advance Study.” Her books include “More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States” and 2022′s “South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation.”
Perry posted on Instagram Wednesday that she was “very grateful” to be named a fellow.
In a short video released by the foundation, Perry says: “I’m always trying to write in a way that pushes us towards a deeper, both recognition of others and reckoning with our history, so that we might actually not replicate injustice, and get ourselves closer to a deep commitment to seeing the dignity and offering respect to all of those in our midst.”
The fellowship comes close on the heels of another honor: Perry and David Mathews have been named 2023 Alabama Humanities Fellows by the Alabama Humanities Alliance. She is scheduled to appear Oct. 23 at the group’s annual Alabama Colloquium. Additionally, Perry won the National Book Award in 2022 for “South to America.”
Perry is at least the fourth person with Alabama connections to be named a MacArthur Fellow in recent years. The 2020 honorees included novelist N.K. Jemisin, who spend part of her youth in Mobile, and activist Catherine Flowers, founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice. 2021 fellows included Daniel Alarcon, a writer and radio producer who spent much of his youth in the Birmingham area.
