Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie at the Wisconsin Book Festival by talatu-carmen

Our heartiest congratulations to the DC area’s only MacArthur Genius this year, Chimamanda Adichie! Adichie is a novelist living in Columbia MD, writing about her native Nigeria. Her latest, Half of a Yellow Sun, is set against the backdrop of the late 1960s Civil War in Nigeria, when the Igbo people seceded and formed Biafra. The MacArthur Genius grants are a $500,000 award, with no strings whatsoever, given annually to the people determined by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The are but three criteria for the grant: “exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishment, and potential for the fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work.”

Congratulations Chimamanda!

There were also two Baltimore-based winners this year, both at Johns Hopkins: Peter Pronovost, critical care physician, and Adam Riess, astronomer and cosmographer.