As Covid continues to limit in-person events, the 2020 class of Pulitzer Prize winners is stepping up with more and more virtual discussions, readings and performances.
In prior years, these might only have been available to local audiences — now they are accessible to all. Review recent event highlights below, and check the Pulitzer events page for more online appearances by this year's winners and finalists, as well as those from previous classes, including Wynton Marsalis, Fredrik Logevall and Rick Bragg.
CUNY TV spoke to "A Strange Loop" playwright and 2020 Drama winner Michael R. Jackson about "the role of the Black artist in this time of racial awakening" this week. Also part of the conversation: actors Capathia Jenkins and Anthony Wayne and host Patrick Pacheco.
Jackson said growing up in Detroit, and subsequently coming to New York where he found a "melting pot" brimming with people of even more diverse backgrounds, gave his work a "real sense of specificity." The experience led him to ask: "What's the specific kind of character here, and the specific kind of Black character here, so that people sort of can really have either a mirror or a window into what it means to walk in a body such as this."
In September, the National Arts Club presented a conversation with New Yorker cartoonist Barry Blitt on his craft as part of its NAC @ Home series. Blitt self-deprecatingly said, "Every line you put down, it's easy to second-guess," but went on to explain his takes on political cartoons of Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama as well as Donald Trump, and subjects such as New York City's smoking ban. Cartoons that never made it to print are included as well.
Composer Anthony Davis, recognized for "The Central Park Five," was interviewed by UC Talks, "a hyper local podcast" for University City in San Diego, where Davis is a professor at UCSD.
Asked what made him create an opera about the Central Park Five, he said an opera company had come to him with the libretto, asking for recommendations on who might write the music. Davis replied: "Yes, I'd like to do it."
"I thought it was a powerful story. And it presented a lot of different challenges for me as a composer. So I was very interested in it. And also the subject — basically it's the genesis of the Black Lives Matter movement."
France24 interviewed Poetry winner Jericho Brown, opening with a clip from the Paris Review of him reading some of his work. Asked whether he's been writing poetry during the pandemic, Brown said, "I've been writing lines, is what I'll say I have been writing," admitting that as a professor at Emory what he's been working on most recently is grading papers.
Biography winner Benjamin Moser discusses the concept of "creative citizenship" during challenging times in this video from 5X15. Moser hearkens to his subject, Susan Sontag, who was born in the year Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany and grew up in wartime America, seeing the first pictures of Nazi death camps in a Los Angeles bookstore at age 12.
At that point, Moser said, she found the question, "What can you do?" to be "no longer theoretical." He talks more about how authors and artists process events such as those America is experiencing with its current political landscape amid the Covid pandemic.
Visit the Pulitzer.org events page or follow @PulitzerPrizes on Twitter for upcoming virtual talks, readings, workshops, performances and other events with current and past prize winners.