Betting on Her Future   

The Washington Post's Katherine Boo wins a genius award.

Katherine Boo, a Washington Post reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner known for giving a voice to the poor and disabled, becomes one of a handful of journalists to receive a $500,000 "genius award" from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

The foundation awards the five-year, no-strings-attached fellowships annually to nurture the work of creative individuals across the United States.

When she received the unexpected phone call, Boo, 38, was exhausted, having just returned home from observing women in an Oklahoma City housing project.

"The sirens in my neighborhood were so loud I couldn't hear what he was saying," Boo says. "What if I'm just imagining this? What if it's a fantasy? What if it's Joe Arthur from D.C. Auto?" she says she thought. "I had him say it twice."

"It's pretty obvious if you know her and see her work that she's exceptional," says Daniel Socolow, director of the MacArthur Fellows Program. Socolow says the award isn't for what recipients have done--instead it's "betting on them for the future." Since the awards were started in 1981, 15 of the program's 635 fellows have been journalists.

For Boo, currently on a leave of absence from the Post to write a book, the timing couldn't have been better. A contributor to The New Yorker and a former editor and writer at Washington City Paper and The Washington Monthly , Boo says she has been filled with doubts about the usefulness of narrative forms. She worries, she says, that readers too often relate intensely to one or two characters in her stories instead of seeing the broader issues.

"If it doesn't illuminate the larger structural issue, it's just voyeurism for readers, and why would you want to do that?" she says.

Jeff Leen, the investigations editor at the Post who worked with Boo three years ago on her Pulitzer-winning piece on the neglect and abuse of the mentally retarded in Washington, says he "couldn't think of a more deserving person, with the skill and dedication, everything you would want to see honored."

Not only can Boo crack open government secrets and piece together stories from thousands of documents, Leen says, she has an extraordinary ability to "combine hard-core investigative reporting with the more lyrical type of writing."

The first thing she wants to do with the money, Boo says, is purchase a digital camera so she can capture the faces and places behind her words.

"There is a security that for five more years I can afford to do this," she says, "and afford to take chances I might not otherwise afford to take."