Every time a cop shoots an unarmed black man I think of the dedication page in Claudia Rankines Citizen: Because white men cant police their imaginations / Black men are dying.
"Because white men can't police their imaginations / Black men are dying."—from Claudia Rankine's Citizen. JAMIYLA LOWE

If you've been keeping up with the book section right here in the Stranger, then you've already met this year's literary MacArthur fellows.

In addition to changing the way academic leaders talk about race in literature, Claudia Rankine's Citizen explored the dailiness of racism, the near constant clashes of our contemporary and historical selves.

In The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson queered queerness and wove theory with memoir to create a visceral, funny, and edifying book about love, motherhood, and indeterminacy.

Lauren Redniss's Thunder and Lightning saved me from the doldrums of winter. The book is narrative nonfiction about people who live in harsh weather, and her gorgeous, copper plate photogravure etchings fully immerse you in the worlds of her subjects.

Finally, there's Gene Luen Yang, who's done everything from highbrow literary graphic novels to superhero comics, challenging Asian-American stereotypes all along the way. He confronted racism in the gorgeous and fantastical braided comic, American Born Chinese. Then he wrote Boxers and Saints, a massive, two-volume historical comic about the Boxer Rebellion. He's currently working on New Super-man, a superhero series that gives the All-American DC hero Chinese origins.

This is an interesting group. Both Rankine and Nelson started out as poets before becoming known for creating / breaking the rules of literary collage, a genre that enjoyed a resurgence of popularity in the late 1990s. Redniss also uses the techniques of literary collage, in the sense that she lashes disparate stories together with associative logic. She doesn't appear to draw on her personal life as much as Nelson or Rankine do, but she does design every aspect of her books herself, right down to the font. So even if she's not present in her narratives, she's present in the curve of every letter and the color of every page.

All these writers play at the edges of genre. When you're reading Nelson, Redniss, and Rankine in particular, you can't tell if you're reading a poem or a chunk of theory or a short story or a Wikipedia entry, but whatever it is it's smart and you like it.

Every single one of them deserves the $625,000, which they get to spend however they damn well please. Hopefully they use it to come visit us again!

Here's the full list of the 2016 MacArthur Fellows.