The Pulitzer Prize for Biography is one of the seven American Pulitzer Prizes annually awarded for Letters, Drama, and Music. The award honors "a distinguished and appropriately documented biography by an American author." Award winners received $15,000 USD.
Kim Marie Severson is a reporter for The New York Times. She won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 as part of The New York Times coverage of sexual harassment and abuse and is a four-time James Beard award–winner for food writing. Severson has published multiple cookbooks and a cooking themed memoir.
Manohla June Dargis is an American film critic. She is one of the chief film critics for The New York Times. She is a five-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.
Peter Balakian is an Armenian-American poet, prose writer, and scholar. He is the author of many books including the 2016 Pulitzer prize winning book of poems Ozone Journal, the memoir Black Dog of Fate, winner of the PEN/Albrand award in 1998 and The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response, winner of the 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize and a New York Times best seller. Both prose books were New York Times Notable Books. Since 1980 he has taught at Colgate University where he is the Donald M and Constance H Rebar Professor of the Humanities in the department of English and Director of Creative Writing.
Michael S. Schmidt is a two time Pulitzer prize winning American journalist, author, and correspondent for The New York Times in Washington, D.C. He covers national security and federal law enforcement, and has broken several high-profile stories. He is also a national security contributor for MSNBC and NBC News.
Ayad Akhtar is an American playwright, novelist, and screenwriter of Pakistani heritage, awarded the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. His work has received two Tony Award nominations for Best Play, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Edith Wharton Citation for Merit in Fiction. Akhtar's writing covers various themes including the American-Muslim experience, religion and economics, immigration, and identity. In 2015, The Economist wrote that Akhtar's tales of assimilation "are as essential today as the work of Saul Bellow, James Farrell, and Vladimir Nabokov were in the 20th century in capturing the drama of the immigrant experience."
Matt Apuzzo is an American journalist working for The New York Times.
Nikole Sheri Hannah-Jones is an American investigative journalist, known for her coverage of civil rights in the United States. She joined The New York Times as a staff writer in April 2015, was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2017, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2020 for her work on The 1619 Project. Hannah-Jones is the inaugural Knight Chair in Race and Journalism at the Howard University School of Communications, where she also founded the Center for Journalism and Democracy.
Viet Thanh Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American professor and novelist. He is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.
William Fitzgerald Harper, known professionally as William Jackson Harper, is an American actor and playwright. He is best known for his role as Chidi Anagonye on the NBC comedy The Good Place (2016–2020), for which he was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series. In 2022, he starred in a lead role in the comedy mystery series The Resort. In 2023, he portrayed Quaz in the Marvel Cinematic Universe film Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.
Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America is a 2017 book by James Forman Jr. on support for the 1970s War on Crime from Black leaders in American cities. It won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the Lillian Smith Book Award.
Dana Canedy is an American journalist, author, and publishing executive who worked at the New York Times for over 20 years, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 2001. She was appointed senior vice president and publisher of Simon & Schuster's flagship eponymous imprint in July 2020. She is the first African-American to head a "major publishing imprint".
Michael R. Jackson is an American playwright, composer, and lyricist, best known for his musical A Strange Loop, which won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the 2022 Tony Award for Best Musical. He is originally from Detroit, Michigan.
The 1619 Project is a long-form journalism endeavor developed by Nikole Hannah-Jones, writers from The New York Times, and The New York Times Magazine focused on subjects of slavery and the founding of the United States. The first publication from the project was in The New York Times Magazine of August 2019. The project developed an educational curriculum, supported by the Pulitzer Center, later accompanied by a broadsheet article, live events, and a podcast. Historians, journalists, and commentators have described the 1619 Project as a revisionist historiographical work that takes a critical view of traditionally reverenced events and people in American history, including the Patriots in the American Revolution, the Founding Fathers, along with later figures such as Abraham Lincoln and the Union during the Civil War. On May 4, 2020, the Pulitzer Prize board announced that they were awarding the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary to Hannah-Jones for her introductory essay.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 2020.
Marcia Chatelain is an American academic who serves as the Penn Presidential Compact Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2021, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History for her book Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, for which she also won the James Beard Award for Writing in 2022. Chatelain was the first black woman to win the latter award.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 2021.
Beverly Gage is an American academic who is a professor of history and American studies at Yale University. She was the director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale. She is the author of The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terror and G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century. In 2021, Gage was nominated to the National Council on the Humanities.
Hernan Diaz is a writer. His 2017 novel In the Distance was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He also received a Whiting Award. For his second novel Trust, he was awarded the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
