On behalf of the Pulitzer Prize Board, welcome to the celebration of the Pulitzer Prize Centennial. Throughout 2016, this newly designed website will be a portal for information about events all across the country meant to examine prize-winning work in journalism, letters, drama and music.
The guiding principle of the centennial is to spark campfires to celebrate the Pulitzer Prizes and to inspire conversation around the values they represent. We hope you will follow us here, join in the conversation and attend a Pulitzer-themed event near you.
It is by no means too late to start a campfire of your own. It could be as simple as including Pulitzer Prize-winning books in your reading group and sharing your members’ observations via Pulitzer social media channels. A college class in Tennessee has an all-Pulitzer curriculum. Local libraries and schools are inviting prize-winners to speak.
Pulitzer provides no financial support for such projects, but if you wish to participate, please email [email protected] and you will receive useful information about what to do.
The principal kindler for our Campfires Initiative is the Federation of State Humanities Council. The Pulitzer Board partnered with the federation 18 months ago. Together we carried out a state-by-state grant process during 2015. Humanities councils in 45 states and Guam received grants totaling more than $1.5 million for Pulitzer Prize-related programs during 2016.
These programs will vary widely, from discussions, to readings and performances, to radio documentaries, to exhibitions, to student and teacher programs. One includes a nature outing, another a year-long consideration of editorial cartoons. All the events are Pulitzer-themed, and most include Pulitzer Prize winners.
The Pulitzer Prize Board has also partnered with organizations in five cities to celebrate the centennial this year. After a kickoff event this month in Washington, D.C., for prize winners only, the series of public marquee events will unfold in St. Petersburg, Los Angeles, Dallas and Cambridge. Please watch this website for details about the events and our marquee partners.
In addition, while maintaining its status as the home of the Pulitzer Prize process, this website will become far more dynamic, starting now. Its content will include a calendar of events as well as extensive social media and other postings reporting on centennial events before and after they’ve happened. Pulitzer Prize-winning work, background material from our files and fresh essays from Pulitzer winners will be posted on weekdays to celebrate the history of the prizes.
A year and a half of work and planning have gone into preparing for the centennial. We hope the result serves three over-arching aims: to celebrate the Pulitzer Prizes as a record of the journalistic and cultural strides our country has made during the past century; to inspire new generations; to involve citizens — meaning you — in a conversation about the values underlying prize-winning work and the importance of these values as we head into the second century of Pulitzer Prizes.
So our message to you as we begin this year is not so much institutional as personal. Welcome aboard.
Sincerely,
Paul Gigot, chair, Pulitzer Prize Board
Keven Willey, Pulitzer Prize Centennial chair
Mike Pride, Pulitzer Prize administrator
The Pulitzer Prize Board