UMD Grad Jason Reynolds Awarded MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’

Popular author of YA, children’s books about kids of color to receive $800K.

By Maryland Today Staff | Maryland Today

A Terp who became a bestselling author of books for young readers was announced Tuesday as one of 22 winners of the 2024 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, widely known as the “genius grant.”

Jason Reynolds ’05 will receive a $800,000, no-strings-attached award in recognition of his work “depicting the rich inner lives of kids of color and ensuring that they see themselves and their communities in literature,” the foundation said. 

The surprise windfall will go to other creative individuals and scholars including the co-creator of the TV series “Reservation Dogs,” two evolutionary biologists and a disability justice activist. 

“For me, there’s something very interesting about being acknowledged amongst the pool of ‘luminaries’ in all these different categories,” Reynolds told The Washington Post. “I think the beauty of the MacArthur, as opposed to the National Book Award or the Peabody, is that it’s open to all disciplines.”

Reynolds began writing poetry at age 9 but read a book cover-to-cover for the first time only after he arrived at the University of Maryland as an English major. That was “Black Boy,” by Richard Wright, and it inspired Reynolds to consider the lack of books that reflected his identity and community growing up in Oxon Hill, in Prince George’s County, Md.: the crack epidemic, the advent of HIV/AIDS or the emergence of hip-hop. 

“There are very few books that I know of written during that time that talk directly about those things,” Reynolds told Terp magazine in 2018.

Read the full story in Maryland Today.