10. Pulitzer Prizes

The Pulitzers were announced today, and I thought I'd feature just a few of the winners. (There will be a poem. Deservedly!)

First, for Illustrated Reporting and Commentary, someone who floats into my email box every so often—including just today: Ann Telnaes of the Washington Post, "for delivering piercing commentary on powerful people and institutions with deftness, creativity—and a fearlessness that led to her departure from the news organization after 17 years." Here's today's cartoon: 

For Commentary, Mosab Abu Toha, "for essays on the physical and emotional carnage in Gaza that combine deep reporting with the intimacy of memoir to convey the Palestinian experience of more than a year and a half of war with Israel." Toha is a poet from Gaza, author of Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear and Forest of Noise. Here is one of those New Yorker stories, from last October.

For Fiction, Percival Everett's James (which also won the National Book Award), "an accomplished reconsideration of Huckleberry Finn that gives agency to Jim to illustrate the absurdity of racial supremacy and provide a new take on the search for family and freedom." Here is a New York Times Book Review podcast about it (with a couple of spoilers). I am currently "reading" James—or rather, listening (via Audible) . . . and yes, I need to finish it. Maybe this prize can be my incentive. 

For Biography, "Awarded to Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life by Jason Roberts (Random House), a beautifully written double biography of Carl Linnaeus and Georges-Louis deBuffon, 18th century contemporaries who devoted their lives to identifying and describing nature's secrets, and who continue to influence how we understand the world." I had not heard of this book, but I am very interested in Linnaeus (a favorite stop of mine some years ago in Sweden was his house and garden). 

For Music, "Awarded to 'Sky Islands,' by Susie Ibarra, a work about ecosystems and biodiversity that challenges the notion of the compositional voice by interweaving the profound musicianship and improvisatory skills of a soloist as a creative tool." Here is a work-in-progress excerpt:

For Memoir/Autobiography: Tessa Hulls for Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir, "an affecting work of literary art and discovery whose illustrations bring to life three generations of Chinese women—the author, her mother and grandmother, and the experience of trauma handed down with family histories."

And finally, for Poetry: Marie Howe for her New and Selected Poems and "work that mines the quotidian modern experience for evidence of our shared loneliness, mortality and holiness." Here's a short poem of hers:

The Copper Beech

Immense, entirely itself,

it wore that yard like a dress,

with limbs low enough for me to enter it

and climb the crooked ladder to where

I could lean against the trunk and practice being alone.

One day, I heard the sound before I saw it, rain fell

darkening the sidewalk.

Sitting close to the center, not very high in the branches,

I heard it hitting the high leaves, and I was happy,

watching it happen without it happening to me.