Former Park Slope Resident Ben Lerner Receives 2015 MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’

Long-time Brooklyn resident Ben Lerner has just been awarded a prestigious and rather mysterious 2015 MacArthur ‘Genius Grant.’

Lerner is a novelist, poet, and critic who also is a faculty member at Brooklyn College’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program.

Lerner is a former Park Slope neighbor, who moved just across Flatbush Avenue to Prospect Heights. In 2013 he was living in our neighborhood when he was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship.

According to the MacArthur Foundation website, “The MacArthur Fellowship is a ‘no strings attached’ award in support of people, not projects. Each fellowship comes with a stipend of $625,000 to the recipient, paid out in equal quarterly installments over five years.”

His writing includes his novels Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) and 10:04: A Novel (2014).

Lerner tells us that winning this grant is very different from others. “It’s a lot more money — so it enables you to make a lot of space for making work — and it’s a lot more mysterious; you don’t apply, for instance. So it comes as more of a shock, certainly.”

Currently, Lerner is busy on a new project. “I’m finishing up a little book called ‘The Hatred of Poetry’ — about why poetry, throughout history, is denounced and then defended,” he says. “Since Plato, poetry has been the art we love to hate. I’m also working on some new poems, an essay about art conservation, and I have an idea for a novel that might go nowhere.”

As for Lerner’s favorite haunts? “I love Community Bookstore [143 7th Avenue, between Garfield Place and Carroll Street] and I also love Unnameable Books [600 Vanderbilt Avenue at St. Marks Avenue].”

He describes what is unique about teaching and creating in the local community, saying that “literature feels very alive in Brooklyn.”