Maaza Mengiste Awarded MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant
Professor of English Maaza Mengiste was on a break while serving jury duty in the Bronx when she got an unexpected call. Though the call came through as spam, she answered and received some surprising news: She would be among an exclusive group of 2026 MacArthur Fellows awarded a “genius grant” to pursue their creative interests.
“There was such a disconnect between where I was and the news,” she said. “I was completely stunned.”
Like all MacArthur Fellows, Mengiste was unaware she had been nominated and only learned of the award of $800,000 through that phone call a couple of weeks before the official announcement. According to the MacArthur Foundation, fellows are selected for their exceptional creativity; promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishments; and potential for the fellowship to enable or facilitate subsequent creative work.
The Foundation describes Mengiste as a “fiction writer revealing the human costs of political violence through a compelling blend of history, memory, and imagination.” Her first novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze (Norton & Company, 2010), follows a physician and his two sons during the fall of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie and the rise of an oppressive military junta. In The Shadow King (Norton, 2019)—which was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize—Mengiste brings to life the little-known history of women resistance fighters during the Italian occupation of Ethiopia (1935–1941).
Mengiste has not yet determined how she will use her fellowship, which comes with no strings attached. The fellowship, she said, “gives me some freedom to take even greater risks in the next work I do and the projects I take on. So, I'm really, really grateful for that.”
For a forthcoming work, A Brief Portrait of Small Deaths (Doubleday), Mengiste focuses on the interwar period in Berlin. The novel will contemplate the rise of the Nazis from the perspective of Black Germans, including some who served as models for German Expressionist artists.
Mengiste, who has been teaching creative writing at Wesleyan since 2023, may also be inspired to explore further with her students the historical and archival research that drives her fiction.
“I just feel completely grateful and humbled,” she said. “I want to make good use of the time and a bit of the inspiration that this allows, the flexibility, [so] I can now push even further in my work.”
Mengiste received a BA from the University of Michigan and an MFA (2007) from New York University. Prior to Wesleyan, Mengiste was on the faculty of Princeton University and Queens College. She is also editor of Addis Ababa Noir (2019). Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in New York Review of Books, The New York Times, London Review of Books, and Granta.
