Congratulations to poet Tyehimba Jess (15) who today won a Pulitzer Prize in poetry for his collection Olio. Tyehimba came to MacDowell in the summer of 2015 to work on his final revisions for Olio and begin his next project. The Pulitzer Board recognized Olio as “a distinctive work that melds performance art with the deeper art of poetry to explore collective memory and challenge contemporary notions of race and identity.”
We also congratulate Pulitzer Prize in Fiction winner Colson Whitehead (MF 99, 11), whose The Underground Railroad the Pulitzer Board called “a smart melding of realism and allegory that combines the violence of slavery and the drama of escape in a myth that speaks to contemporary America.”
Additional congratulations are due to journalist Neil MacFarquhar (06) who is part of The New York Times team who won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for “agenda-setting reporting on Vladimir Putin’s efforts to project Russia’s power abroad, revealing techniques that included assassination, online harassment and the planting of incriminating evidence on opponents.”
Composer Kate Soper's (MF 13) IPSA DIXIT was announced as a 2017 Pulitzer finalist in music! Theatre artist Taylor Mac (MF 14) was also named a 2017 Pulitzer finalist in drama for A 24-Decade History Of Popular Music. Finally, congratulations to Adam Haslett (MF 5x 99-12), a Pulitzer Prize finalist in fiction for his Imagine Me Gone.
