UMD Grad Jason Reynolds Awarded MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’

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.

He’s gone on to write nearly two dozen books tackling complex topics: racism, economic inequity, police brutality and grief. Among them are “Long Way Down,” a novel in verse about a boy considering avenging his brother’s fatal shooting, and “Look Both Ways,” a National Book Award finalist that tells the stories of the home lives of several children who live in the same neighborhood.

Last year, he won a Caldecott Honor for his first book for young children, “There Was a Party for Langston,” about the Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes. His latest, “24 Seconds From Now,” about two Black teens falling in love, will be released Oct. 8.

Reynolds has also won the Newbery Award and is the recipient of multiple Coretta Scott King honors and many other awards. He was the 2020–22 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, championing the joys of storytelling to reluctant readers and encouraging them to tell their own stories. He also serves on the faculty at Lesley University’s Writing for Young People MFA Program.

He told The Post that he was about to block the unfamiliar phone number when he answered yet another call from what turned out to be the MacArthur Foundation telling him of his honor. Now, he says of the award, the “gift of being on the other side of any sort of financial struggle gives me the opportunity to actually use it for something to help somebody else.”