Academics Win Pulitzers in Arts and Letters

A number of the Pulitzer Prize winners in arts and letters announced Monday have strong ties to academe. They are:

• Hernan Diaz, associate director of the Hispanic Institute for Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University, who won the fiction prize for Trust (Riverhead Books), which the Pulitzer committee described as “a riveting novel set in a bygone America that explores family, wealth and ambition through linked narratives.”
• Jefferson Cowie, James G. Stahlman Professor of History and the director of the economics and history major at Vanderbilt University, who won the history prize for Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power (Basic Books), “a resonant account of an Alabama county in the 19th and 20th centuries shaped by settler colonialism and slavery.”

• Beverly Gage, a professor of 20th-century U.S. history at Yale University, who won the biography prize for G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century (Viking), “a deeply researched and nuanced look at one of the most polarizing figures in U.S. history.”
• Hua Hsu, a professor of English at Bard College, who won the prize for memoir or autobiography for Stay True (Doubleday), “an elegant and poignant coming of age account that considers intense, youthful friendships but also random violence that can suddenly and permanently alter the presumed logic of our personal narratives.”
• Carl Phillips, a professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis, who won the poetry prize for Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007–2020 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), “a masterful collection that chronicles American culture as the country struggles to make sense of its politics, of life in the wake of a pandemic, and of our place in a changing global community.”