2021 Pulitzer Prize Winners

Congratulations to the 2021 Pulitzer Prize Winners! The Pulitzer Prize was established in 1917  through the will of Joseph Pulitzer, a visionary American journalist, who wished to incentivize excellence and innovation in American journalism and letters. 

This year, the literary works recognized demonstrate an increased interest in social justice and honoring the exemplary work of writers addressing the brutal history and complex reality of race in America. Below, we have highlighted a few of the winners currently in our collection. But we encourage you to peruse the full list of finalists and winners here

 

Fiction: The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich

The Night Watchman is based on the extraordinary life of National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich’s  grandfather, who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C. This powerful novel explores themes of love and death with lightness and gravity and unfolds with the elegant prose, sly humor, and depth of feeling of a master craftsman.

History: Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America by Marcia Chatelain

A nuanced account of the complicated role the fast-food industry plays in African-American communities, Chatelain’s work is a portrait of race and capitalism that masterfully illustrates how the fight for civil rights has been intertwined with the fate of Black businesses. From civil rights to Ferguson, Franchise reveals the untold history of how fast food became one of the greatest generators of black wealth in America.

Biography: The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X by Les Payne and Tamara Payne

Les Payne, the renowned Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist, embarked in 1990 on a nearly thirty-year-long quest to interview anyone he could find who had actually known Malcolm X. The Dead are Arising is the result—A powerful and revelatory account of the civil rights activist, which rewrites much of the known narrative and offers insight into his character, beliefs and the forces that shaped him. Les and Tamara Payne have crafted a riveting work that affirms the centrality of Malcolm X to the African American freedom struggle.

Poetry: Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz

Postcolonial Love Poem is a collection of tender, heart-wrenching, and defiant poems that explore what it means to love and be loved in an America beset by conflict. It is an anthem of desire against erasure, demanding that every body carried in its pages—bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers—be touched and held as beloved.

 

General Nonfiction: Wilmington’s Lie : The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy by David Zucchino

Wilmington’s Lie is a gripping account of the overthrow of the elected government of a Black-majority North Carolina city after Reconstruction that untangles a complicated set of power dynamics cutting across race, class and gender. It gives an account of a racially-motivated insurrection launched by white supremacists, which halted gains made by Black people and restored racism as official government policy, cementing white rule for another seventy years. 

Pulitzer Prize winner David Zucchino uses contemporary newspaper accounts, diaries, letters and official communications to create a riveting and compelling narrative that weaves together individual stories of hate, fear, and brutality. This is a dramatic and definitive account of a remarkable but forgotten chapter of American history.

–Summaries adapted from the publisher

Twitter Email

Congratulations to the 2020 Pulitzer Prize Winners for Fiction & Poetry!

After being delayed due to Covid-19, the winners of the Pulitzer Prize were announced via livestream on May 5th, 2020. The winner for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction was Colson Whitehead, for his work The Nickel Boys, and the winner for Poetry was Jericho Brown, for his poetry collection The Tradition.

In addition to the 2020 Pulitzer Prize, Whitehead was awarded the Prize once before in 2017 for his novel, The Underground Railroad. Many of Whitehead’s works can be found in the library, plenty of which are available as ebooks and audiobooks. For more information about Colson Whitehead and his works, you can visit his website and twitter page.

Cover Art

Book. The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead. Click for catalog link.

Cover Art

E-Audiobook. The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead. Click for catalog link.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cover Art

E-Audiobook. The Intuitionist, by Colson Whitehead. Click for catalog link.

Cover Art

E-Audiobook. John Henry Days, by Colson Whitehead. Click for catalog link.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jericho Brown is an American poet and professor at Emory University. In addition to winning the Pulitzer Prize, he has also been awarded the American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. For more information on Brown, you can visit his website and twitter page.

Cover Art

Book. The Tradition, by Jericho Brown. Click for catalog link.

Cover Art

Book. Please, by Jericho Brown. Click for catalog link.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cover Art

Book. The New Testaments, by Jericho Brown. Click for catalog link.

 

 

Twitter Email

Kendrick Lamar’s Pulitzer Prize Win

One of the many covers of articles circulating the web, from CNN Money

A few days ago, the Pulitzer Prizes where announced, and one winner in particular surprised many people: Kendrick Lamar for his album Damn. I for one was not surprised at all because if you, like me, have listened to his amazing albums, you knew that this was coming. His lyrics in sweet tempo with his sound choices is so relevant and representative of today’s black culture that I am honestly surprised that this has not happened earlier. All of his albums have explored very similar themes, and have also recreated (at least for me) what poetry is. To Pimp A Butterfly at times reads more like a complex poetic piece exploring life than actual music, and is in his ability to create deep, and sometimes even, analytic pieces what makes Kendrick Lamar one of the best artists out there. It’s in his formidable capability to recreate the rough gang world from which he comes from and intermesh it with his feelings, contemplations, and most importantly, hope, that makes him so worthy of a Pulitzer and the public fame he is now under.

If you don’t believe me, or haven’t checked out his dope music yet, I recommend you do!

Here is where you can get To Pimp a Butterfly.
Here is where you can get Damn.
If you want to check out all that’s available by Kendrick, click here.
Twitter Email