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Mary Bonauto, Alison Bechdel, Samuel Hunter are MacArthur Fellows
2014-09-17

This article shared 4565 times since Wed Sep 17, 2014
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Lesbian attorney Mary Bonauto and lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel are among the 21 selections for the 2014 MacArthur Fellows awards. Gay playwright Samuel Hunter, whose work The Whale was at Victory Gardens theater recently, is also among the honorees. Each receive no-strings-attached stipends of $625,000.

More honorees are listed there: www.macfound.org/fellows/class/class-2014/ .

Following are the descriptions of each of the winners from the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation website:

Alison Bechdel is a cartoonist and graphic memoirist exploring the complexities of familial relationships in multilayered works that use the interplay of word and image to weave sophisticated narratives. Bechdel's command of sequential narrative and her aesthetic as a visual artist was established in her long-running comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For ( 1983—2008 ), which realistically captured the lives of women in the lesbian community as they influenced and were influenced by the important cultural and political events of the day.

Garnering a devoted and diverse following, this pioneering work was a precursor to her book-length graphic memoirs. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic ( 2006 ) is a nuanced depiction of a childhood spent in an artistic family in a small Pennsylvania town and of her relationship with her father, a high school English teacher and funeral home director. An impeccable observer and record keeper, Bechdel incorporates drawings of archival materials, such as diaries, letters, photographs, and news clippings, as well as a variety of literary references in deep reflections into her own past.

Bechdel composes an intricate, recursive narrative structure that is compelling on both the visual and verbal planes in Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama ( 2012 ), a meditation on her relationship with her emotionally distant mother seen through the lens of psychoanalytic theory. As in Fun Home, the images in Are You My Mother? do not always correspond to or illustrate the words; rather, they mutually interpret or often tug against each other, creating a space between them that invites a multiplicity of interpretations. With storytelling that is striking for its conceptual depth and complexity in structure as well as for the deft use of allusion and reference, Bechdel is changing our notions of the contemporary memoir and expanding the expressive potential of the graphic form.

Alison Bechdel received a B.A. ( 1981 ) from Oberlin College. She is the editor of Best American Comics ( 2011 ), and her comic strip work has been collected in numerous volumes, most recently The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For ( 2008 ). Her work has also appeared in such publications as Slate, the New York Times Book Review, McSweeney's, Granta, and The New Yorker.

Bonauto is a civil rights lawyer whose powerful arguments and long-term legal strategies have led to historic strides in the effort to achieve marriage equality for same-sex couples across the United States. The Civil Rights Project Director at Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders ( GLAD ) since 1990, much of her early work focused on adoption and parenting, censorship, hate crimes, and discrimination in jobs and public accommodations.

Mindful of the risks of loss and political backlash when social reform litigation advances ahead of public understanding, Bonauto and her GLAD colleagues initially pursued an incremental, state-based strategy to secure government marriage licenses for same-sex couples in the New England states. Bonauto and Vermont colleagues formed a critical partnership in 1997, which is widely acknowledged as a pivotal time and place to challenge a state's exclusion of gay and lesbian couples from marriage. The Vermont Supreme Court's ruling in Baker v. Vermont ( 1999 ) was the first to hold that same-sex couples must be provided all of the same protections and obligations provided to married couples, and the state legislature established the first civil union law in the nation in 2000 to comply with that ruling. GLAD's subsequent filing of Goodridge v. Department of Public Health in Massachusetts, relying again on state constitutional guarantees of equality and liberty, resulted in the 2003 landmark decision that made that state the first to extend marriage equality to same-sex couples. Bonauto's constitutional arguments in Goodridge articulated the breadth of the practical and social harms imposed by the state's exclusion on real families and their children. In defending the marriage ruling from attempts to substitute civil unions, she drew on painful lessons from our nation's past, most notably the history of unjust "separate but equal" doctrines as substitutes for racial and gender equality, and the Massachusetts high court was the first to reject civil unions as a substitute for marriage. The Goodridge ruling, the transformative effect of same-sex couples marrying on the public's views, and subsequent legal ( in Connecticut ), legislative ( in Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire ), and ballot-based ( in Maine ) victories all provided a solid foundation and roadmap for future strategies across the nation, including at the federal level.

In 2009, Bonauto led a team from GLAD and private law firms in the first strategic challenge to section three of the federal Defense of Marriage Act ( DOMA ) and argued that the federal government's non-recognition of the lawful and rapidly growing number of marriages unconstitutionally denied same-sex couples more than 1,000 federal protections and obligations usually available to married persons. Her case—Gill v. Office of Personnel Management—provided the first federal court wins in challenges to DOMA ( in 2010 and 2012 rulings ), and served as an important model for United States v. Windsor, the landmark case that ultimately resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court striking down DOMA in 2013 and on which she served as a strategist and external coordinator of friend-of-the-court briefs. In the name of equal treatment and dignity for all people, and in concert with other litigators and advocates across the country, Bonauto is breaking down legal barriers based on sexual orientation and influencing debates about the relationship between the law and momentous social change more broadly.

Mary L. Bonauto received a B.A. ( 1983 ) from Hamilton College and a J.D. ( 1987 ) from Northeastern University School of Law. She has been the Civil Rights Project Director at the Boston-based Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders ( GLAD ) since 1990. Since 2013, she has been the Shikes Fellow in Civil Liberties and Civil Rights and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School.

Samuel D. Hunter, who according to The New York Times "lives in New York and was married in August to the dramaturge John M. Baker," according to MacArthur is a playwright who crafts moving portraits of unlikely protagonists and explores the human capacity for empathy through the prism of his characters' struggles. Born and raised in a small Idaho town, he sets much of his work in his native region, within the nondescript confines of staff break rooms, cramped apartments, and retirement homes inhabited by ordinary people in search of more meaningful human connections. Despite the stark realism of his settings, Hunter leavens his plays with humor and compassion for the lives he depicts, while juxtaposing the banal circumstances of his characters with literary allusions and larger themes of faith and doubt.

A Bright New Boise ( 2010 ) examines the various ways that regret, disappointment, and the longing for some kind of transcendence shape peoples' actions and concludes with the central character, an evangelical Christian, calling upon the Rapture from a chain store parking lot. In The Whale ( 2012 ), one of his most widely produced works to date, Hunter tells the story of Charlie, an expository writing instructor who has been driven by grief to a state of morbid obesity. A writing assignment on Melville's Moby Dick becomes a leitmotif that resonates throughout the play, as its lonely and adrift characters move toward a deeper understanding of the hopes and motivations that propel one another.

Hunter premiered three new plays during the 2013—2014 season—The Few ( 2013 ), Rest ( 2014 ), and A Great Wilderness ( 2014 )—that continue his interest in the poetry of everyday speech and the aspirations of those seldom celebrated on the stage, from a staff of outcasts who run a newspaper for lonely, long-haul truckers to the octogenarian residents of a rest home days away from shutting down. Eschewing irony and judgment of his characters' decisions, Hunter's quietly captivating dramas confront the polarizing and socially isolating aspects of contemporary life across the American landscape.

Samuel D. Hunter received a B.F.A. ( 2004 ) from New York University, an M.F.A. ( 2007 ) from the University of Iowa, and an Artist Diploma ( 2009 ) from Juilliard's Playwrights Program. He is a resident playwright at New Dramatists, an ensemble playwright at Victory Gardens, and a member of Partial Comfort Productions. His plays have been produced at such venues as Playwrights Horizons, South Coast Repertory, Victory Gardens, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Seattle Repertory Theatre, The Old Globe, and Rattlestick Playwrights Theater.


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