{"id":319,"date":"2025-10-13T03:12:10","date_gmt":"2025-10-13T03:12:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/319\/"},"modified":"2025-10-13T03:12:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-13T03:12:10","slug":"tommy-orange-talks-about-his-plans-for-the-2025-macarthur-fellowship-the-mercury-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/319\/","title":{"rendered":"Tommy Orange talks about his plans for the 2025 MacArthur Fellowship \u2013 The Mercury News"},"content":{"rendered":"

Award-winning novelist Tommy Orange made headlines Wednesday when he won a MacArthur Fellowship<\/a> \u2014 often referred to as a \u201cgenius grant.\u201d But it turns out the Oakland writer had been keeping the intel quiet for about a month already after Chris Lovely, senior program officer at the MacArthur Foundation, pranked him when delivering the good news.<\/p>\n

She\u2019d set up a call asking for his input on another person she said was a fellowship candidate. Then, when he got on the call, she flipped the script and told him he\u2019d been selected.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was all kind of a blur,\u201d he said in an interview.<\/p>\n

The win is a high-profile acknowledgment of the significance of Orange\u2019s work, which spotlights stories of urban Indigenous people who are rarely represented in popular culture. He is the author of the award-winning novels \u201cThere There\u201d (Knopf, 2018) and \u201cWandering Stars\u201d (Knopf, 2024), books set largely in Oakland that tell stories of contemporary Native American characters and the ways that trauma is transmitted across generations. They also incorporate references to historical events, including the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and the 1969-71 Occupation of Alcatraz.<\/p>\n

Orange, who is enrolled in the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma, grew up in Oakland\u2019s Dimond District and went on to graduate from the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe.<\/p>\n

The MacArthur Fellowship comes with an $800,000 no-strings-attached award, and arrives at an important time in his career.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs writers, we are always figuring out how to do the work that will support us being able to write for a living,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

He is working on a new novel called \u201cThe Pretendians\u201d (Knopf), and had been on the verge of taking a university teaching job that would\u2019ve taken him away from writing, he said. But with the fellowship funds, he can instead focus on his writing \u2014 which he feels a strong sense of urgency to produce, given the \u201clooming AI situation,\u201d as he described it.<\/p>\n

\u201cI do feel like there\u2019s some kind of ticking clock on how long creative people will be in demand and be able to have careers,\u201d he said. \u201cThe timing is really amazing with that in the background of everyone\u2019s lives. I have been wanting to put out a lot of creative work in the next two years, and this really allows that to be possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

Writers around the Bay Area lauded Orange\u2019s win.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe deserves, in my opinion, every award possible,\u201d said Laurie Ann Doyle, a Berkeley-based author and co-founder of the San Francisco-based Babylon Salon, where Orange gave a reading for his first book.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Doyle also praised his involvement in teaching writing. Orange led a short story workshop last weekend at San Francisco\u2019s Mechanics\u2019 Institute in exchange for funding to support Native elders.<\/p>\n

One of the attendees, journalist and fiction writer Nate Olivarez-Giles, said that rather than presenting feedback on the stories as a problem to solve, Orange helped the writers by \u201cimagining what could be possible, how we could push ourselves,\u201d he said. \u201cThe whole dynamic and energy of it felt much more nurturing than a lot of these spaces can feel.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m still buzzing off of it, feeling so inspired,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Orange\u2019s writing holds particular significance for Olivarez-Giles, who recently moved to Oakland and is a descendant of the Yaqui tribe in southern Arizona and Mexico. He read \u201cThere There\u201d last year at age 40, and it was the first time he\u2019d seen a fictional story that reflected his experience of his Native American identity, as someone who is urban, ethnically mixed and Indigenous, with some awareness about what it means to be Native but yearning to learn more.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019d never seen that in a book before, anywhere,\u201d he said. \u201cIt makes me more excited to be living in Oakland and be\u00a0a writer in Oakland.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a video profile by the MacArthur Foundation, Orange discussed his literary focus on the contemporary, urban experiences of Native Americans. \u201cEighty percent of Native people live in cities, and the way we\u2019re depicted is still with Pilgrims or in relation to cowboys, or at best, reservation life, and it\u2019s just not the case for how we live our lives,\u201d he said. \u201cI wanted to highlight what it\u2019s like for Native people to be living in a city like Oakland.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"OaklandOakland author Tommy Orange looks on before speaking at Oakland Tech in Oakland on Friday, Oct. 10, 2025. Orange writes about the urban Native American experience, and he was a 2025 MacArthur Fellow, a prestigious award referred to as a “genius grant.” (Ray Chavez\/Bay Area News Group)\u00a0
\nAdditional Bay Area MacArthur Fellows<\/p>\n

Two Bay Area scientists also received MacArthur fellowships: Teresa Puthussery, 46, a UC Berkeley neurobiologist and optometrist who studies how neural circuits of the retina encode visual information for the primate brain, and William Tarpeh, 35, a Stanford chemical engineer working on methods to recover chemical resources from wastewater.<\/p>\n

The Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation, created by John D. And Katherine T. MacArthur, awards the fellowships to exceptionally creative individuals who have a track record of excellence in their field and show an ability to impact society in \u201csignificant and beneficial ways,\u201d according to its website. They must be nominated, after which a selection committee goes through a rigorous review process. This year, there were 22 U.S. fellows named.<\/p>\n

The awards often come as a surprise to the winners. Tarpeh said he was informed of his\u00a0at a pre-scheduled meeting with the foundation to get his insights on a program focused on social justice on wastewater.<\/p>\n

\u201cHonestly, my mind was blank, and I only gradually gained some consciousness back as the team congratulated me and explained some of the logistics,\u201d he said. \u201cI then called my wife (we are allowed to tell one person) and shared the news and she was about as shocked as I was!\u201d<\/p>\n

Originally Published: October 11, 2025 at 4:00 AM PDT<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Award-winning novelist Tommy Orange made headlines Wednesday when he won a MacArthur Fellowship \u2014 often referred to as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":320,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[647,181,143,145,144,182,420],"class_list":{"0":"post-319","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-oakland","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-latest-headlines","10":"tag-oakland","11":"tag-oakland-headlines","12":"tag-oakland-news","13":"tag-pm-report","14":"tag-things-to-do"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=319"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/320"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}