Though widely known for his way with words, Manuel Muñoz, an acclaimed English professor at the University of Arizona, was speechless on Wednesday afternoon.
It was understandable.
Muñoz, along with 19 other Americans, had just been named a prestigious MacArthur fellow.
The award is commonly known as the “genius grant” and is given yearly to Americans who show “extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction,” according to the program.
“I’ve been struggling, honestly, to find the words to describe how I’m feeling,” Muñoz said in a phone interview soon after the news broke. “It’s been a really phenomenal day.”
The award is extra meaningful to Muñoz because just a few short years ago he had considered stopping publishing works of fiction.
“I was not thinking of writing much anymore,” he said. “So to see this kind of accolade come my way, it just brought me to tears.”
Muñoz, who has taught at the UA since 2008, writes literature centered on California’s Central Valley, where he is from, that often features gay men and their families living in rural spaces.
“I just know what this is going to mean, not just for me, but for students in the Central Valley,” he said. “That’s a major thing, if you can see yourself in art. You might have a desire to replicate it and participate in some way.”
The MacArthur Foundation seems to agree wholeheartedly with the author.
“Muñoz captures the specificity of a region readers seldom see and reveals forms of resilience that come from refusing to surrender to misfortune,” the program’s website stated.
It’s easier for the author to think about the award going towards the community rather than just to him, he said.
“I’m having a much easier time seeing it as uplifting the stories of my community,” he said. “There’s no way for me to really know how and why they selected me, but my sense is that they knew why I was focusing on an underrepresented community.”
Muñoz added that he feels the committee is recognizing the “consistency and wholeheartedness” that he writes about experiences with.
As part of the award, he will receive an $800,000 grant over the next five years. Winners can spend the money however they choose. Some of that money, he said, will go to establishing a scholarship fund in his parents’ names at Reedley College, a small community college near Dinuba, where he was born and raised.
“I want to find a way for students who come from my background and my valley to see that there are others opening the door for them,” he remarked, choking up with tears.
The foundation has run the fellowship since 1981 and selected more than 1,030 recipients.
The awards are given to individuals “of outstanding talent to pursue their own creative, intellectual, and professional inclinations,” according to the foundation’s website, and the grants are not tied to a specific project or institution. Many past fellows like Octavia Butler, Paul Farmer and Twyla Tharp are luminaries in their fields and Marlies Carruth, who directs the MacArthur Fellows program, emphasized that they hope fellows will support and inspire each other. The foundation also hosts events for current and past recipients, the AP reported.
Muñoz, who has known about the grant for four weeks but was sworn to secrecy from the MacArthur Foundation, has written two short-story collections including 2003’s Zigzagger and 2007’s The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue. He most recently published a collection entitled The Consequences, which won the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates Prize.
“This grant makes me feel a lot more comfortable making sure that my next book is short stories,” he said. “I’m feeling so confident that that’s the direction we’re going in.”
Most people think his novels and short stories are memoirs, but that isn’t the case.
“I take the little elements that I’ve heard in family lore, or a friend of the family has shared, and just let myself imagine because I wasn’t there to witness,” he said. “That’s the sort of work we do as writers, is to imagine.”
The English professor is not the first University of Arizona professor to win this award. There have been seven other award winners who worked at the University, including anthropology professor Brackette Williams and sociology professor Jennifer Carlson. Carlson won the award just last year.
The vetting process sometimes takes years, as those considered do not apply themselves and are instead nominated.
After having four weeks to process, Muñoz is still struggling to put the importance of the grant into words. Right now he’s in the Bay Area working with a new literacy project, but he’s already looking forward to returning to the UA, with this new accolade, to teach his students once again.
“I think it’s important for my students [of similar backgrounds] to hear that this kind of recognition can come for one of us,” he said. “I’m looking forward to those conversations.”
Each year, the foundation calls the new class of fellows in advance of the public announcement and fellows described being shocked and stunned by the news after receiving a call from an unknown number, which they had sometimes initially ignored, the Associated Press reported Wednesday.
Because he didn’t know he was even being considered for the grant, Muñoz described thinking the phone call, which he got repeatedly, was a spam call on a polling service.
“I finally answered it in my kitchen,” he said. “And as soon as they said the words it didn’t feel real.”
Ada Limón, who recently began her second term as the country’s poet laureate, said she first missed a call the day after her grandmother, Allamay Barker, had died at the age of 98. It wasn’t until the foundation emailed her that she called back. She said she wept when she heard the news.
“I felt like losing the matriarch of my family and then receiving this, it felt like it was a gift from her in some ways,” she said, speaking to the Associated Press from her home in Lexington, Kentucky.
As poet laureate, she commissioned an anthology of poems “You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World,” to be published in April and also arranged for historic poems to be installed at seven national parks. NASA is planning to send a poem Limón wrote for an upcoming mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa as part of a time capsule. The poem will be engraved on the spacecraft.
“One of the things that feels most emotional and remarkable to me is that this recognition is coming from within the poetry community,” Limón told AP.
