Two of the 26 recipients of this year’s MacArthur Fellowship award are Black queer men.
The so-called “genius” fellowship awards each recipient $800,000, paid quarterly over five years. The honor allows them time to continue pursuing their creative endeavors, aligning with the philanthropic foundation’s goal of “building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world.”
Meet poet Jericho Brown and dancer/choreographer Shamel Pitts.
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Jericho Brown – Poet
Brown’s poetry collections examine masculinity, spirituality, family, sexuality, and racial identity through traditional and contemporary musical and poetic forms, pop, jazz, and blues.
“My poems are about the human condition, a condition of loneliness. And if you understand that everyone experiences that, then loneliness can indeed become a way to get to love, a way to get to joy, a way to get to celebration. And poems allow for that in a way no other art can,” he says.
Brown’s first book, Please (New Issues, 2008), won the American Book Award, and his second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon, 2014), was named one of the best poetry books of the year by Library Journal and received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.
His third collection, The Tradition (Copper Canyon, 2019), won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in the Nation, the New Republic, the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Time, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry anthologies.
Shamel Pitts – Choreographer
As a classically trained dancer, Pitts is known for creating multidisciplinary performances incorporating unique lighting, projection, electronic music, fashion, and other elements through an Afro-futuristic lens.
“I love dance because of its power and capacity to communicate nonverbal language; there’s a lot of poetry in motion, and there’s the possibility to connect to many different things at the same time,” he says.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Shamel began his dance training at LaGuardia High School for Music & Art and the Performing Arts and, simultaneously, at The Ailey School.
Pitts founded Tribe, a multidisciplinary Brooklyn-based arts collective, where he works alongside other artists to “reimagine a future in which we thrive as black and brown people, in which our bodies are rendered spaces of regeneration and potential and connection and community.”
