Maaza Mengiste, Dinaw Mengistu among Guggenheim Fellows 2022.

Maaza Mengiste and Dinaw Mengistu are among the Guggenheim Fellows 2022 announced on Thursday, April 7, 2022.

Guggenheim Fellowships are grants awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those “who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.” The fellowship has been awarded to more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award, and other internationally recognized honours.

The fellows for 2022, whittled down from over 2,500 applications on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise, were announced on Thursday.   

“Now that the past two years are hopefully behind all of us, it is a special joy to celebrate the Guggenheim Foundation’s new class of Fellows,” said Edward Hirsch, President of the Guggenheim Foundation and 1985 Fellow in Poetry. “This year marks the Foundation’s 97th annual Fellowship competition. Our long experience tells us what an impact these annual grants will have to change people’s lives. The work supported by the Foundation will aid in our collective effort to better understand the new world we’re in, where we’ve come from, and where we’re going. It is an honor for the Foundation to help the Fellows carry out their visionary work.”

The fellows of African descent who made the cut for 2022 are;

Poetry

• Yona Harvey – Poet, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Associate Professor of English, University of Pittsburgh

Fiction

• Dinaw Mengestu – Writer, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of the Humanities, and Director, Written Arts Program, Bard College
• Maaza Mengiste – Writer, Bronx, New York; Professor of English, Wesleyan University
• Ladee Hubbard – Writer, New Orleans, Louisiana.

General Nonfiction

• Jerald Walker – Writer, Hingham, Massachusetts; Professor of Creative Writing and African American Literature, Emerson College
• Thomas Chatterton Williams – Writer, Paris, France

Literary Criticism

• Bénédicte Boisseron – Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies; Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan

African Studies

• Olufemi O. Vaughan – Alfred Sargent Lee & Mary Lee Professor, Department of Black Studies, Amherst College