Heather McHugh has won a $500,000 “genius” grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, reports the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Recipients receive the “no strings attached” award over the course of five years, according to the foundation’s Web site.

McHugh, who was born in San Diego in 1948, has been a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in the past. According to the Academy of American Poets, other honors have included “two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Lila Wallace/Reader’s Digest Award, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, and, in 2006, one of the first United States Artists awards. From 1999 to 2006 she served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets, and in 2000 was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. For over 20 years, she has served as a visiting faculty member in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and since 1984 as Milliman Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington in Seattle.”