Award-winning novelist Tommy Orange made headlines Wednesday when he won a MacArthur Fellowship — often referred to as a “genius grant.” 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.
She’d 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’d been selected.
“It was all kind of a blur,” he said in an interview.
The win is a high-profile acknowledgment of the significance of Orange’s work, which spotlights stories of urban Indigenous people who are rarely represented in popular culture. He is the author of the award-winning novels “There There” (Knopf, 2018) and “Wandering Stars” (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.
Orange, who is enrolled in the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma, grew up in Oakland’s Dimond District and went on to graduate from the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe.
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The MacArthur Fellowship comes with an $800,000 no-strings-attached award, and arrives at an important time in his career.
“As writers, we are always figuring out how to do the work that will support us being able to write for a living,” he said.
He is working on a new novel called “The Pretendians” (Knopf), and had been on the verge of taking a university teaching job that would’ve taken him away from writing, he said. But with the fellowship funds, he can instead focus on his writing — which he feels a strong sense of urgency to produce, given the “looming AI situation,” as he described it.
“I do feel like there’s some kind of ticking clock on how long creative people will be in demand and be able to have careers,” he said. “The timing is really amazing with that in the background of everyone’s 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.”
Writers around the Bay Area lauded Orange’s win.
“He deserves, in my opinion, every award possible,” 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.
Doyle also praised his involvement in teaching writing. Orange led a short story workshop last weekend at San Francisco’s Mechanics’ Institute in exchange for funding to support Native elders.
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 “imagining what could be possible, how we could push ourselves,” he said. “The whole dynamic and energy of it felt much more nurturing than a lot of these spaces can feel.”
“I’m still buzzing off of it, feeling so inspired,” he said.
Orange’s 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 “There There” last year at age 40, and it was the first time he’d 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.
“I’d never seen that in a book before, anywhere,” he said. “It makes me more excited to be living in Oakland and be a writer in Oakland.”
In a video profile by the MacArthur Foundation, Orange discussed his literary focus on the contemporary, urban experiences of Native Americans. “Eighty percent of Native people live in cities, and the way we’re depicted is still with Pilgrims or in relation to cowboys, or at best, reservation life, and it’s just not the case for how we live our lives,” he said. “I wanted to highlight what it’s like for Native people to be living in a city like Oakland.”
Oakland 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)
Additional Bay Area MacArthur Fellows
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.
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 “significant and beneficial ways,” 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.
The awards often come as a surprise to the winners. Tarpeh said he was informed of his at a pre-scheduled meeting with the foundation to get his insights on a program focused on social justice on wastewater.
“Honestly, my mind was blank, and I only gradually gained some consciousness back as the team congratulated me and explained some of the logistics,” he said. “I then called my wife (we are allowed to tell one person) and shared the news and she was about as shocked as I was!”