Ellora Derenoncourt spends her working life on one question: why the wealth gap between Black and white families in this country has barely moved in 150 years. The MacArthur Foundation has handed her $800,000 and told her to keep going.
Derenoncourt, 39, is an economist at Princeton University. Her research traces the origins of racial disparities in wealth and economic mobility across the United States. She is one of 20 fellows in the 2026 class.
Maaza Mengiste, 55, is in that class too. She teaches English at Wesleyan University and previously held faculty positions at Princeton and Queens College. Her novel The Shadow King was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize.
The grant is $800,000, paid over five years.
That structure is the part worth sitting with. Most money that reaches Black women researchers and writers arrives with a deliverable attached: a report due, a cycle to re-apply for, a funder to keep satisfied. Five years of committed funding is long enough to follow a question past the point where a grant cycle would have made you abandon it.
For Derenoncourt, the question is the one sitting underneath almost every story on this site. Why the pay gap does not close. Why a house in one neighborhood builds equity and the same house three miles over does not. Why a Black woman with the same degree and the same title retires with a fraction of the savings.
For Mengiste, it is a different kind of recovery work. The Shadow King put Ethiopian women soldiers at the center of a war history that had written them out.
The rest of the 2026 class is Holly Jean Buck, Felipe De Brigard, Elizabeth Ellis, Kaiyu Guan, Trajal Harrell, Marika Holland, Christine Sun Kim, Song Lin, Layli Long Soldier, Rodney McMillian, Ariel Ron, Kate Spradley, Chip Thomas, Vincent Valdez, Vincenzo Vitelli, Bryan Washington, Immanuel Wilkins and Liangfang Zhang.
The foundation said this year’s fellows “explore the depths of our humanity; they reveal untold origins to modern challenges; they expand the edge of scientific inquiry and life-saving research.”
Two Black women are inside that sentence this year. One of them is studying why our grandmothers’ work did not turn into our inheritance.
