LSA Alumna Awarded MacArthur “Genius” Grant

Maaza Mengiste (A.B. 1993) is one of 20 recipients of the 2026 MacArthur Fellowship, awarded each year by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The fellowship provides each recipient with $800,000 in unrestricted funding over five years, recognizing exceptional creativity and investing in the potential of individuals across a range of fields. 

Mengiste is a professor of English at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English language and literature from U-M in 1993 and a Master of Fine Arts from New York University in 2007.

Mengiste is a fiction writer who depicts the moral and personal harms of political conflict in works that render both the intimate textures of individuals’ lives and the broad sweep of historical events unfolding around them. She grounds her novels in extensive research and inhabits multiple historical and fictional voices, offering complex, sometimes competing, accounts of periods of violence in 20th-century Ethiopia.

Mengiste’s first novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze (2010), follows a physician and his two sons during the fall of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie and the rise of an oppressive military junta. In The Shadow King (2019), Mengiste brings to life the little-known history of women resistance fighters during the Italian occupation of Ethiopia (1935–1941). 

Mengiste turns to the interwar period in Berlin in her novel in progress, A Brief Portrait of Small Deaths, which will contemplate the rise of the Nazis from the perspective of Black Germans, including some who served as models for German Expressionist artists. “Through a compelling blend of history, memory, and imagination, Mengiste is revealing new insights into the human costs of political violence,” the MacArthur Foundation says in its award citation.

Photo courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.