San Francisco disability justice activist and beloved author Alice Wong has been selected to receive a MacArthur ‘genius grant.’
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced its 22 selections for the 2024 class of fellows yesterday and introduced Wong via a short video posted to X.
Wong also announced the news on X, stating: “Hard to believe but I am a 2024 @macfound Fellow! I am accepting the MacArthur Fellowship amidst the genocide happening in Gaza and indiscriminate terroristic attacks in Lebanon by the state of Israel on the 76th year of their occupation of Palestine.”
Recipients of the grant will each receive $800,000 over five years to dedicate to their particular disciplines. MacArthur fellows are nominated by their peers and are selected by the foundation on the basis of “exceptional creativity, as demonstrated through a track record of significant achievement, and manifest promise for important future advances.” The grant is intended to enable fellows to pursue their most innovative ideas.
Wong, the founding director of the Disability Visibility Project, was born with a progressive neuromuscular disability. She has worked tirelessly to draw attention to the hardships and discrimination faced by Americans living with disabilities. Wong has amplified the voices of disabled writers with two essay anthologies, 2020’s Disability Visibility and 2024’s Disability Intimacy. She also released a memoir, Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life, in 2022.
After suffering a series of serious medical crises that year, Wong wrote for KQED: “What I’ve known in my bones during my entire 48 years on this planet is that nothing is certain, and that we must build a world that acknowledges our interdependence with one another so no one ever falls through the cracks … I know we can transform the world if we have the political and collective will to do so.”
Wong was the only 2024 fellow to hail from the Bay Area. Two other Californians made the list, however. Pasadena’s Joseph Parker, an evolutionary biologist working at the California Institute of Technology, and Juan Felipe Herrera, a poet, educator and writer based in Fresno.
