MacArthur Fellow Matthew Aucoin Talks Composing And Donating His 'Genius' Money

Composer Matthew Aucoin has earned one of the most prestigious awards in the arts and sciences. Wednesday he was announced as a 2018 MacArthur Fellow, a recipient of the so-called "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation, which includes a $625,000 no-strings-attached purse. Aucoin, the youngest winner this year, joins 24 other Fellows, whose work spreads wide across the arts, humanities and sciences. Violinist Vijay Gupta, media scholar Lisa Parks and choreographer Okwui Okpokwasili are also among this year's recipients — read more about them here. Since 1981, nearly 1000 people have been awarded the MacArthur grant.

Aucoin, 28, is a quadruple threat. By the age of 25 he was already winning praise as a composer, conductor, pianist and writer, to "opera's great hope." , his 2015 opera set to his own text and based on the diaries of Walt Whitman's work as a Civil War nurse, was as a "taut, teeming and inspired work."