The Rev William Barber, the North Carolina pastor, national civil rights leader and anti-poverty activist has won a 2018 MacArthur “genius” grant – one of 25 people to receive the prestigious fellowship this year, it was announced on Thursday.

The MacArthur Fellows Program, popularly known as the “genius grant”, annually gives a series of $625,000, no-strings-attached awards to people the institution finds to be extraordinarily talented and creative in different fields.

Barber is the longtime pastor of Greenleaf Christian church in Goldsboro, North Carolina, and a leader of the new Poor People’s Campaign – the modern incarnation of a campaign for fairer living standards launched by Martin Luther King Jr before his death by assassination in 1968.

Barber has been hailed as a leader of the emerging, modern “religious left” – a label he rejects.

“There is no religious left and religious right,” Barber told the Guardian this spring. “There is only a moral center. And the scripture is very clear about where you have to be to be in the moral center – you have to be on the side of the poor, the working, the sick, the immigrant.”

His campaign launched weeks of civil disobedience and protest against inequality, racism, environmental devastation and militarism, while pushing for living wage laws and expanded voting rights.

He was also the leader of the Moral Mondays campaign in North Carolina, which promoted non-violent civil disobedience and backed successful legal challenges to voter suppression and racial gerrymandering after “far-right extremists took over the Grand Old Party [the Republicans] and turned it into a joyless, humorless, mean-spirited vehicle to line the pockets of the super-rich”, Barber wrote in the Guardian in 2013. After Hurricane Florence hit North Carolina last month, Barber warned of the disproportionate suffering of poor people during such crises.

Announcing the 2018 awards, the MacArthur organization wrote: “Barber approaches social justice through the lens of the ethical and moral treatment of people as laid out in the Christian Bible, the Reconstruction and civil rights movements of the South, and the US Constitution.” The program added: “He is effective at building unusually inclusive fusion coalitions that are multiracial and interfaith, reach across gender, age and class lines, and are dedicated to addressing poverty, inequality, and systemic racism.”

The awardees include poets, engineers, computer scientists, chemists, lawyers, community organizers and more.

Also winning this year’s grant are Becca Heller, a human rights lawyer who runs the International Refugee Assistance Project and helped fight the US travel ban against a list of majority Muslim nations early in the Trump presidency; Deborah Estrin, a computer scientist at Cornell Tech working on apps for personal health management; and Ken Ward, an investigative journalist who has revealed the environmental and human toll of coalmining in West Virginia.

Other fellows include artist and curator Julie Ault, painter Titus Kaphar, writer John Keene and film-maker and performance artist Wu Tsang.

Pioneering scientists such as psychologist Kristina Olson, who led a study that found that transgender children who are allowed to dictate their gender identity and change their names have better mental health, and neuroscientist Doris Tsao, who created eerily perfect replicas of human faces that had been shown to monkeys just by recording the animal’s brain waves, will also be awarded grants this year.

View the full list of fellows here.