Ta-Nehisi Coates (MacArthur Foundation/YouTube)
Every year the MacArthur Foundation offers no-strings-attached funding to a select group of “geniuses” so that they have the money and space to go on to do their best work. This year’s group of 24 includes winners in a variety of fields from playwrights to community organizers to chemists. Each of these winners will get $625,000 over five years. Two men named have connections to the D.C. area: journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates and environmental health advocate Gary Cohen. (Eds. note: This post has been updated to reflect the fact that neither man actually currently calls D.C. home though both work for organizations based here.)
“We take ‘no strings’ quite seriously,” Cecilia A. Conrad, the foundation’s managing director, told the New York Times. “They don’t have to report to us. They can use the funds in any way they see fit.”
Not all of the recipients are unknowns or early in their careers. Coates, for example, is well-known for his work for The Atlantic, tackling the legacy of slavery and taking up the case for reparations, and his second book, Between the World and Me, is currently on the New York Times bestseller list. Vermont poet Ellen Bryant Voigt is 72 is a recipient. Lin-Manuel Miranda is the current writer and star of a hit Broadway musical Hamilton. However, the foundation looks for people who are on their way up in their respective fields. Conrad told the Times, “We try to reach people who have shown evidence of exceptional creativity but show the potential for more in the future.”
The recipients are concentrated heavily on the East Coast: seven of the 24 winners are from New York City alone, and more than two-thirds come from the East Coast, the Chicago Tribune notes.
The foundation released videos for each of the recipients, profiling their work.
Gary Cohen, 59, is an environmental advocate, who has been working with hospitals to make sure the motto “do no harm” applies to communities outside hospital walls as well as patients within. He has been working for over two decades to discourage hospitals from using dangerous chemicals that harm the environment. Cohen lives in Boston, but his Reston-based organization Health Care Without Harm works with several thousand hospitals around the world.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, 39, is a journalist, blogger and recently a memoirist. The foundation says of him: “Writing without shallow polemic and in a measured style, Coates addresses complex and challenging issues such as racial identity, systemic racial bias, and urban policing.” Update: The West Baltimore native is listed as being from D.C., where he went to Howard University and spent the formative years of his career, though he later moved to Harlem. He recently relocated his family to Paris. He writes for D.C.-based The Atlantic.
