Pulitzer Prize Board 2020-2021
The Trustees of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation have elected Elizabeth Alexander to be the Foundation’s next President, effective March 2018. Alexander will succeed Earl Lewis, who has served as President since 2013.
Alexander, a renowned writer, poet, and scholar, is recognized as one of the nation’s leading voices in modern literature and a bold visionary in the academy. Over the course of a distinguished academic and artistic career, she has developed a number of complex, multi-arts and multi-disciplinary teams, departments and partnerships, and dedicated herself consistently to creating, building and sustaining highly successful institutions – from the Poetry Center at Smith College, to a major rebuilding of the African American Studies department at Yale University, from the poetry non-profit Cave Canem, to the Ford Foundation’s programs in journalism, arts and culture.
“The Mellon Foundation is dedicated to the enrichment of the arts and humanities, both inside and outside of colleges and universities; these practice areas are fundamental to strengthening not only our learning institutions, but also the human spirit,” said Danielle Allen, Chair of the Mellon Foundation Board. “Through her work as a professor and mentor, Elizabeth knows the academic system well, and as an architect of interdisciplinary programs, she has deep experience in cultivating partnerships that extend and amplify creative vision. A poet who brings an artist’s forward-looking energy to institutional purpose, Elizabeth is the right person for our times as the Foundation seeks to widen the community of stakeholders committed to the arts and humanities and to increase the resources dedicated to this work.”
The Mellon Foundation, the nation’s most generous and active supporter of the humanities, is committed to five core program areas: higher education and scholarship in the humanities; arts and cultural heritage; diversity; scholarly communications; and international higher education and strategic projects. The Foundation believes that the health of arts and humanities is critical to the success of higher education, to the human spirit and societal well-being, and to civic preparation. The Foundation seeks to broaden the role the humanities play in education, innovation, and civic discourse, by providing grants and strategic guidance to support educational and cultural institutions, research, and public humanities engagements.
“I have lived my entire life with art, culture, and scholarship as companion, guide, and discipline,” said Alexander. “I am guided by the justice values of increasing access to the power of higher education to open and strengthen minds, encourage human exchange, and thus transform lives. I am deeply honored to have been selected to lead Mellon, an institution that has been devoted to these areas across its history, and to have been called to the crucial work of building community within and across discipline and institution. The humanities show us deeply who we are and what it means to move through life by the light of cultural vision. I am excited for the work ahead of elevating the truth, beauty and rigor of the arts and higher learning and making them more accessible to all.”
Most recently, Alexander served as the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor in the Humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Prior to assuming her position, she served as the Director of Creativity and Free Expression at the Ford Foundation.
While at the Ford Foundation, Alexander co-designed the Art for Justice Fund, a $100 million fund seeded by philanthropist Agnes Gund to transform the criminal justice system and all of its inequities through art and advocacy.
“Elizabeth is one of the brightest lights in the academy and a remarkable artist. She made an invaluable contribution to the arts program at Ford and I’m confident that she will be a great leader of the Mellon Foundation,” said Darren Walker, President of the Ford Foundation.
Alexander spent 15 years on the faculty of Yale University, beginning in 2000. She was appointed the inaugural Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry in 2015, and served as the Thomas E. Donnelly Professor of African American Studies and as the Chair of the African American Studies Department. Prior to those appointments, she was a professor in the departments of African American Studies, American Studies and English. She served as the inaugural Director of the Poetry Center at Smith College, and taught for seven years at the University of Chicago, where she won the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. She also taught at New York University’s Graduate Creative Writing Program.
“The unique qualities that make Elizabeth Alexander the creative and intellectual force we have been so proud to welcome to Columbia will undoubtedly serve her well in her new leadership role at the Mellon Foundation,” said Columbia President Lee C. Bollinger. “While our university community will miss the first-hand benefit of her relentless commitment to conveying and improving the human condition, we are delighted by her ascent in the philanthropic world and look forward to working with her in her new mission of scholarship and service.”
“She will be a passionate spokesperson for the ideas of Mellon and the humanities and the arts; this is what she does every day. She is visionary. She has the ability to embody and communicate the value of liberal education, the humanities and arts, access, diversity, and to do it with poetry,” said Peter Salovey, President of Yale University.
Said outgoing Mellon Foundation President Earl Lewis, who is returning to the academy, and launching a new initiative, The Center for Social Solutions, to focus efforts on three core areas of concern – race and diversity, water, and the future of work, “Elizabeth is a highly regarded academic thought leader and proven philanthropist; she is also someone I admire deeply. I wish her well as she assumes her new role as President of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Her appointment comes at a time when the work of advancing the fundamentals of a prosperous democracy needs forward-looking leaders.”
Lewis delivered the Foundation’s first ever strategic plan and brought grant-making program areas into closer collaboration. Under his leadership, the Foundation brought new institutions into the fold and developed a broader network of partners across the many sectors of the higher education landscape. Lewis also launched significant Presidential initiatives including the Mellon Research Forum and the Our Compelling Interests book series focused on diversity and social connectedness.
In her new role, Alexander will lead the Mellon Foundation in drawing new partners in to support the arts and humanities and in refining the Foundation’s distinctive blend of a commitment to the arts and humanities for social purposes and for their own sake. She expects to build on the Foundation’s success to date in supporting diversification of educational, scholarly, and cultural organizations with an innovative focus on cultivating institutional capacity for inclusive leadership; and she seeks to widen and deepen the impact of the Foundation’s support for a vision of an inclusive America. Linking the Foundation’s international work to its core strategic priorities will also be an important objective.
Alexander is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Light of the World, a memoir on love and loss, which was a finalist in 2016 for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the author of six books of poetry, including American Sublime, a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, and two collections of essays – The Black Interior and Power and Possibility.
In 2009, Alexander wrote and recited an original poem, “Praise Song for the Day,” at the inauguration of President Barack Obama, becoming the fourth-ever poet to read at a presidential inauguration.
Additional works include: Praise Song for the Day; Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems 1990-2010, winner of the Patterson Prize for Poetry and a nominee of the Hurston-Wright Foundation Award for Poetry; The Black Interior, a finalist for Best Non-Fiction, Hurston-Wright Foundation; and Body of Life. Her work has been translated into seven languages.
The recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, Alexander has been recognized with the Anisfield-Wolf Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry, the inaugural Jackson Prize for poetry, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, three Pushcart Prizes for Poetry, and the George Kent Award, presented by Gwendolyn Brooks.
Alexander is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and serves on the Pulitzer Prize Board and on the Advisory Board of the African Poetry Book Foundation.
“Elizabeth Alexander is one of the most remarkable poets of her generation. Her extraordinary poems move across the registers from ode to elegy in contemplation of the many rich layers of African American history, and its many vital forms of community. Having been moved and consoled by her work as an artist, I am thrilled to see what her talents will bring about in her new role at the Mellon Foundation,” said Tracy K. Smith, U.S. Poet Laureate.
Alexander received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania. She earned her Master of Arts in English (Creative Writing) from Boston University, and a Bachelor of Arts in English from Yale University. She holds honorary doctorates from Haverford College, Simmons College, and the College of St. Benedict.
Alexander joined the Pulitzer Prize Board in 2016.
Nancy Barnes is senior vice president of news and editorial director at National Public Radio.
Barnes has spent nearly 30 years leading high-performing teams in delivering award-winning journalism to the public. Prior to joining NPR, she developed the Houston Chronicle into a metro paper known for national caliber journalism with deep local roots. Under her leadership, the Chronicle won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2015 for columns about problems in the legal and immigration systems. The Chronicle also won a Polk award, the Selden Ring Award for Investigations, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Public Service for a series on how Texas state officials denied tens of thousands of students access to special education services. And in 2018, it was a Pulitzer finalist for its coverage of Hurricane Harvey.
Barnes got her start in journalism as a local general assignment reporter, then moved to the statehouse beat, and soon after to progressively more senior news management roles. During her tenure at the Chronicle, she has overseen all print and digital subscriber products and dozens of weekly newspapers, as well as the creation of new products to develop new audiences, including specialty publications, topical newsletters and podcasts. Previously, she served as executive editor at the Minneapolis Star Tribune Media Company, where she directed award-winning journalism that led to the Pulitzer Prize for local news in 2013, Gerald Loeb Awards for business reporting, Edward R. Murrow award for general excellence, Silver Gavel for newspapers, regional Emmys, and other recognitions.
Barnes has a master's degree in business administration from the Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina and a bachelor's degree from the University of Virginia. She is the president of the American Society of News Editors and is a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board, Columbia University.
Barnes joined the Pulitzer Prize Board in 2017.
Lee C. Bollinger is a renowned legal scholar, with an expertise in free speech and the First Amendment. He is an alumnus of Columbia's Law School, where he is also a professor. He became president of Columbia University on June 1, 2002.
Born in Santa Rosa, California, Bollinger was raised there and in Baker City, Oregon. He went on to graduate from the University of Oregon in 1968 and received a J.D. from Columbia Law School. He served as a law clerk to Judge Wilfred Feinberg of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Chief Justice Warren Burger of the U.S. Supreme Court. Bollinger went on to join the faculty of the University of Michigan Law School in 1973, becoming dean of the school in 1987. He became provost of Dartmouth College in 1994 before returning to the University of Michigan in 1996 as president.
Bollinger has authored many articles and books on the subject of free speech such as "The Tolerant Society" (Oxford University Press, 1988) and "Images of a Free Press" (University of Chicago Press, 1991).
President Bollinger is married to artist Jean Magnano Bollinger. They have two children.
Katherine Boo, a former staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, was a reporter at The Washington Post when her series on mistreatment of mentally challenged people in Washington, DC, resulted in the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for The Post. The Pulitzer citation praised her work for exposing "wretched neglect and abuse in the city’s group homes for the mentally retarded, which forced officials to acknowledge the conditions and begin reforms."
Boo is noted for her work focusing on poverty. In 2012, she won the National Book Award for Nonfiction for "Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity," which examined life in the airport slums of Mumbai, India. The book, which was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction, also won nonfiction prizes from PEN, the Los Angeles Times Book Awards, the New York Public Library and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Reared in and around Washington, DC, Boo began her journalism career at the Washington City Paper and later worked at The Washington Monthly. She joined The Washington Post in 1993, serving first as an editor in the Outlook section, then as an investigative reporter. She left in 2001 to write for The New Yorker.
One of her New Yorker articles, "The Marriage Cure," examined efforts to teach poor people in an Oklahoma community about marriage in the hope that it would help them rise out of poverty. The piece won the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing in 2004. Another New Yorker article, "After Welfare," won the 2002 Sidney Hillman Award, honoring work that advances social justice.
Boo graduated summa cum laude from Barnard College and in 2002 received a MacArthur "genius" award. She is married to Sunil Khilnani, a writer and professor who directs the King’s India Institute at King’s College London.
Boo joined the Pulitzer Prize Board in 2013.
Neil Brown is the president of The Poynter Institute. He joined Poynter in September 2017, after serving as the editor and vice president of the Tampa Bay Times.
He was named editor of the Times (formerly the St. Petersburg Times) in May 2010, and in that capacity oversaw the journalism published in the Times, on its website tampabay.com, and in related products including a daily tabloid called tbt*.
During Brown's tenure leading the Times news staff, the paper won more national and state awards than at any time in its history, including six Pulitzer Prizes in the last eight years. He also launched PolitiFact.com, the fact-checking website that has been replicated nationally and inspired similar efforts worldwide.
Brown first joined Times Publishing in 1988, serving as managing editor in Washington, DC at Congressional Quarterly, a former Times affiliate company. He came to the Times in 1993 as world editor in charge of national and international news and then as managing editor and executive editor. He was named to the Times Publishing Company's board in 1997 as a director and was made a vice president in 2001.
A native of Chicago, Brown is a graduate of the University of Iowa, Phi Beta Kappa, with a bachelor's degree in political science and journalism. He began his newspaper career as a reporter and editor at The Miami Herald, covering government and politics in Miami and working in bureaus in Key West, Tallahassee and West Palm Beach.
In 2015, Brown was elected to the Pulitzer Prize Board. He previously served four years as a Pulitzer Prize nominating juror in journalism. He is past president of the Florida Society of News Editors and served six years on the Board of Directors of the American Society of News Editors. In 2010, he was inducted into the Hall of Fame at the University of Iowa School of Journalism.
Brown lives in St. Petersburg with his wife, journalist and author Gelareh Asayesh. They have two children.
Nicole Carroll is Editor in Chief of USA TODAY. She was named to her current position in March 2018. Prior to that, she served as Vice President/News and Editor of The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com. During her time at the Republic, the Republic/azcentral.com was twice named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News. In 2018, the Republic and the USA TODAY Network won the Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting.
Carroll graduated from the Arizona State University Walter Cronkite School of Journalism in 1991. She earned her master’s degree from Georgetown University in 1996. After graduation from ASU, she held reporting and editing jobs at the El Paso Times, USA TODAY and the East Valley (Mesa) Tribune.
Carroll joined The Arizona Republic in 1999, where she held positions ranging from city editor to planning editor to managing editor for features. She was named Executive Editor of the Republic and azcentral.com in 2008. That same year, Carroll was inducted into the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication Alumni Hall of Fame. In 2015, she was named Vice President of News and Editor, and in 2016 she added regional responsibilities, serving as Southwest Regional Editor for the USA TODAY Network.
Carroll received The National Press Foundation’s prestigious 2017 Benjamin C. Bradlee “Editor of the Year” award. She has served as a juror for the Pulitzer Prizes three times (local news, breaking news and public service). She also has served as a judge for the national Hearst Journalism Awards, which honor the best in collegiate journalism. In 2018, she was elected to the board of the American Society of News Editors.
Carroll joined the Pulitzer Prize Board in 2018.
Columbia Journalism School Dean Steve Coll is a staff writer at The New Yorker, the author of eight books of nonfiction, and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Between 1985 and 2005, he was a reporter, foreign correspondent and senior editor at The Washington Post. There he covered Wall Street, served as the paper’s South Asia correspondent in New Delhi, and was the Post’s first international investigative correspondent, based in London. He served as managing editor of the Post between 1998 and 2004. The following year, he joined The New Yorker, where he has written on international politics, American politics and national security, intelligence controversies and the media.
Coll is the author of "Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001," published in 2004, for which he received an Overseas Press Club Award and a Pulitzer Prize. His 2008 book, "The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century," won the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction in 2009 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. His most recent books are "Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power" (2012), which won the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Award as the best business book of 2012, and "Directorate S: The CIA and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2001–2016" (2018).
He has four children and is married to Eliza Griswold, the journalist and poet. He has a B.A. in English and history from Occidental College.
Coll was elected to the Pulitzer Prize Board in 2012 before becoming an ex officio member as dean in 2013.
Gail Collins joined the editorial board of The New York Times in 1995 and six years later became the first woman editor of The Times’ editorial page. At the beginning of 2007, she stepped down and took a leave in order to finish a book, When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present. She returned to the paper as an Op-Ed columnist later in 2007.
Before joining The New York Times, Collins was a columnist at New York Newsday and the New York Daily News. She also was a financial reporter for United Press International.
Her first jobs in journalism were in Connecticut. She was a senior editor for Connecticut Magazine, a weekly columnist for the Connecticut Business Journal and the host of a public affairs program for Connecticut Public Television. She founded the Connecticut State News Bureau, which provided coverage of the state capitol and Connecticut politics. When she sold it in 1977, the CSNB was the largest news service of its kind in the country, with more than 30 weekly and daily newspapers.
Collins’ most recent book is As Texas Goes: How the Lone Star State Hijacked the American Agenda, published in 2012. She is also the author of America’s Women, Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity and American Politics, a biography of William Henry Harrison and The Millennium Book, which she co-authored with her husband, Dan Collins, a writer and editor.
A native of Cincinnati, Collins is a graduate of Marquette University with a B.A. in journalism, and a graduate of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, with an M.A. in government. She is a recipient of an Associated Press award for commentary, 1994; a Women in Communications Matrix Award, 1989; and a Meyer Berger Award, Columbia University, 1987. She was a Bagehot Fellow in Economic Journalism at Columbia in 1981-1982.
Collins joined the Pulitzer Prize Board in 2013.
John Daniszewski is the AP's vice president and editor at large for standards, working with journalists and editors around the world to ensure the highest levels of media ethics and fairness. From 2009 to 2016, he served as AP’s vice president for international news after three decades as a reporter, editor and correspondent assigned to more than 70 countries in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia. He was responsible for more than 500 editors and reporters in some 100 bureaus outside the United States producing coverage from some of the most complex and challenging news-gathering environments.
Daniszewski played a central role in AP’s opening of the first Western news and photo bureau in Pyongyang, North Korea, in 2012, and the Yangon, Myanmar, bureau earlier in 2013 -- the first return to that country by a Western news agency after decades of strict military rule. He worked for the Los Angeles Times from 1996-2006, serving as bureau chief in Cairo, Moscow, Baghdad and London. In 2001, he covered the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and he stayed in Baghdad throughout the U.S. invasion and the toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003. He was part of a team that won an Overseas Press Club award in 2007 and that was a Pulitzer Prize finalist that year for coverage of Iraq’s descent into civil war.
Daniszewski began his journalism career as a stringer for the AP while an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania. He joined the AP staff in Philadelphia in 1979 and later worked in Harrisburg and on the national and international editing desks in New York. In 1987, he was assigned overseas to Warsaw, Poland. There he covered the revival of Solidarity and the end of Communist rule. In 1989, he was shot and wounded in Timisoara, Romania, during the uprising against Nicolae Ceausescu’s communist regime. He later covered wars across the former Yugoslavia, including the siege of Sarajevo. In 1993, he became AP’s bureau chief in Johannesburg, South Africa. He led the AP’s coverage of the election of President Nelson Mandela and the end of apartheid before leaving in 1996 to go to the Times. He returned to AP as international editor in 2006 and was named a managing editor the next year.
Daniszewski graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and the Sulzberger Media Leadership Program at Columbia University. An Ohio native, he is married to Dru Menaker, senior media advisor for the international development organization IREX. They live in Nyack, NY, and have two children in college, Benjamin and Anna. He is a member of the North American Committee of the International Press Institute and the Board of Governors of the Overseas Press Club Foundation.
Daniszewski joined the Pulitzer Prize Board in 2013.
Stephen Engelberg became ProPublica's editor-in-chief on Jan. 1, 2013. He oversees its day-to-day editorial operations, long-term projects and Web strategy. During his time as managing editor, ProPublica became the first online news organization to win Pulitzer Prizes. In 2010, it won the Investigative Reporting prize for chronicling the life-and-death decisions by a hospital’s exhausted doctors when they were isolated by the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina. A year later, it won the National Reporting prize for exposing Wall Street practices that contributed to the nation’s economic meltdown.
Before joining ProPublica, he worked for The Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, The Dallas Morning News, The New York Times and The Oregonian of Portland, Ore., where he was a managing editor. During his years at The Oregonian, the paper won the Pulitzer for Breaking News Reporting and was a finalist for its investigative work on methamphetamines and on charities intended to help the disabled.
Engelberg was with The Times for 18 years, including stints in Washington, DC, and Warsaw, Poland, as well as in New York. After serving as the bureau chief in Warsaw following the collapse of Communism, he resumed work as an investigative reporter. Engelberg shared in two George Polk Awards for reporting: the first, in 1989, for articles on nuclear proliferation; the second, in 1994, for articles on U.S. immigration. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize as a reporter in 1998 for an investigation of the crash of a commuter airplane.
Since 1996, Engelberg has concentrated on editing investigative projects. Engelberg was the first editor of The Times’ investigative unit and directed teams of reporters who won Pulitzer Prizes for national, foreign and explanatory journalism. Among the winning projects were ones that examined Mexican corruption (published in 1997) and the rise of Al Qaeda (published beginning in January 2001).
Engelberg is the co-author of "Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War." He shared an Emmy in 2001 for work on a documentary on biological warfare by the PBS program Nova.
A native of Lexington, Mass., Engelberg graduated from Princeton University in 1979 with a degree in history. He lives in Montclair, N.J., with his wife, Gabrielle Glaser, and three daughters.
Engelberg joined the Pulitzer Prize Board in 2012.
Carlos Lozada is the nonfiction book critic of The Washington Post. He has also served as The Post's economics editor, national security editor and Outlook editor. He received the 2015 National Book Critics Circle's citation for excellence in reviewing. Previously, he was managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine and a Knight-Bagehot fellow in economics and business journalism at Columbia University.
Lozada joined the Pulitzer Prize Board in 2019.
Kelly Lytle Hernández holds the Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History at UCLA. One of the nation’s leading experts on race, immigration, and mass incarceration, she is the author of the award-winning books Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010), City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), and Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands (Norton, 2022). She also leads the Million Dollar Hoods research initiative, which maps fiscal and human cost of mass incarceration in Los Angeles. For her historical and contemporary work, Professor Lytle Hernández was named a 2019 MacArthur “Genius” Fellow. She is also an elected member of the Society of American Historians, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Pulitzer Prize Board.
Lytle Hernández joined the Pulitzer Prize Board in 2020.
Simon & Schuster announced today that Aminda (Mindy) Marqués González will join the company’s adult trade publishing imprint as Vice President and Executive Editor, starting on November 30th.
“I am thrilled that Mindy Marqués is joining Simon & Schuster and bringing her unique and extensive story-telling expertise to our imprint. Mindy will help broaden the range of voices and stories we publish, and will help us expand further into diverse and underrepresented markets,” said Dana Canedy, Senior Vice President and Publisher of Simon & Schuster. “Mindy is an award-winning national journalist and newsroom executive who has led coverage of some of the most historic events of our time. As co-chairperson of the Pulitzer Prize Board, she also brings a unique perspective to evaluating books.”
Marqués added, “I have spent much of my career helping to find and tell the hidden stories of diverse, dynamic and complex communities. Most often, they begin as local and regional stories but they resonate nationally. With Simon & Schuster I will have the privilege to expand the audience for these stories and to help find fresh new voices and authors that represent the rich tapestry of this country. In journalism, the most powerful stories combine deep reporting with beautifully woven narratives. My plan is to bring that sensibility to my new role.”
Aminda (Mindy) Marqués González is currently Senior Vice President/News and Executive Editor of the Miami Herald Media Company and McClatchy’s Florida Regional Editor, which includes Miami Herald, el Nuevo Herald, Bradenton Herald, the Keys digital products and the Tallahassee bureau.
Born in New York to Cuban immigrant parents, Marqués began her career as an intern at the Miami Herald and rose through the ranks to become the paper’s first Hispanic editor in 2010. She is only the second woman to hold the post.
Her career has included assignments as a metro reporter, assistant city editor and deputy metro editor, directing the Miami Herald’s local, state and community news operations. She also was Miami bureau chief for People magazine, overseeing coverage for the southeast U.S., the Caribbean and Latin America.
She returned to the Miami Herald in 2007, where she was a multimedia editor and Sunday/features editor before being named managing editor in May 2010 and executive editor in October 2010.
During her tenure as executive editor, the Miami Herald has won two Pulitzer Prizes and has been a finalist four times. In 2017, the Herald was awarded two Pulitzers, for explanatory reporting and editorial cartooning. The Herald was a finalist in public service for an investigative series detailing Florida’s systemic failures in regulating assisted-living facilities (2012); in local reporting for a series that detailed a local drug sting operation that cost millions but yielded no arrests (2016); in investigative reporting for its series on juvenile prison abuses (2018); and in explanatory reporting for an investigation into money-laundering and Bank Secrecy Act violations in the multibillion-dollar gold trade between Latin America and the United States (2019). The Miami Herald has won a total of 22 Pulitzer Prizes in its history.
Marqués is a 1986 graduate of the University of Florida, where she was honored as an Alumni of Distinction by the College of Journalism and Communications in 2012. She received the Presidential Impact award from the National Association of Hispanic Journalists in 2016 and was inducted into NAHJ’s Hall of Fame in 2018. She was awarded the Benjamin C. Bradlee Editor of the Year award in 2019.
Marqués currently serves as co-chair on the Pulitzer Prize Board, the first Hispanic to serve in that capacity. She sits on the Dean’s Advisory Board for the School of Communications and Journalism at Florida International University, as well as the Lillian Lodge Kopenhaver Center for Women in Communication.
Marqués joined the Pulitzer Prize Board in 2012.
The Los Angeles Times has named Kevin Merida executive editor. Merida succeeds Norman Pearlstine who was The Times’ executive editor until Dec. 2020 when he became senior advisor to the executive chairman, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong.
“We are elated to welcome Kevin to the Los Angeles Times,” Patrick and Michele Soon-Shiong, owners of The Times, said in a statement. “Kevin possesses a clear understanding of the rigor necessary for independent journalism and how to translate that journalism to multiple platforms. He also shares our passion for the unique opportunity we have to build the L.A. Times into a media enterprise with a distinct West Coast point of view.”
Merida has served as a senior vice president at ESPN and editor-in-chief of The Undefeated, a multimedia platform that explores the intersections of race, sports and culture, since November 2015. Under his leadership, The Undefeated launched within and expanded across the Walt Disney Co. with a content portfolio that includes award-winning journalism, documentaries and television specials, music videos and albums, live events and digital talk shows, and two bestselling children’s books. During his tenure at ESPN, he also oversaw the Investigative/News Enterprise unit, the television shows “E:60” and “Outside the Lines,” and chaired ESPN’s Editorial Board.
“I am excited to be the next executive editor of the L.A. Times, and will bring with me an open heart, a penchant for experimentation and a fiercely competitive spirit,” said Merida. “Looking forward to partnering with new colleagues and soaring to greater heights together.
“It was a privilege to lead The Undefeated and work with such an extraordinary collection of talent across ESPN and the Walt Disney Co.,” Merida continued. “I am grateful for all that I learned and all that we accomplished during the past five and a half years, and euphoric about the future.”
Currently based in Washington, D.C., Merida will relocate to Los Angeles and officially assume his role at The Times in June, when he’ll become the 19th editor of the 139-year-old news organization. The Times has been honored with 47 Pulitzer Prizes, co-produces an Emmy-winning daily television news magazine, creates and distributes a variety of successful podcasts, and presents a range of live events as an extension of its journalism. As executive editor, Merida will lead the largest newsroom west of the Potomac and will be responsible for identifying and developing additional platforms and products under the L.A. Times umbrella.
“The Los Angeles Times has consistently produced ambitious journalism and is one of the few counterpoints to the East Coast-centric news media in the national conversation,” said President and Chief Operating Officer of The Times Chris Argentieri. “We’re honored to welcome Kevin to Los Angeles where he’ll help lead the continued transformation of The Times.”
Prior to joining ESPN, Merida worked for the Washington Post, beginning in 1993, and held a variety of roles, most recently as managing editor for news, features and The Post’s Universal News Desk. During his tenure as managing editor, he helped lead The Post to four Pulitzer Prizes, and the newspaper embarked on a digital transformation that made it one of the fastest growing news organizations in the country.
His journalism career began in 1979, after graduating from Boston University and attending the Maynard Institute’s Summer Program for Minority Journalists at UC Berkeley, when he became a general assignment reporter for the Milwaukee Journal. He then worked for the Dallas Morning News in different roles, ultimately as assistant managing editor for national and foreign news.
Merida is co-author of “Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas” and the bestselling “Obama: The Historic Campaign in Photographs.” He is a contributor to and editor of the anthology, “Being A Black Man: At the Corner of Progress and Peril,” based on an award-winning Washington Post series he led. He serves on the Pulitzer Prize Board, the Boston University Board of Trustees, and the boards of WBUR, the Kaiser Family Foundation, the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, the Wallace House at the University of Michigan, and the Gwen Ifill College of Media, Arts, and Humanities at Simmons University.
Merida is married to award-winning former Washington Post columnist and author Donna Britt. They have three sons: Justin and Darrell, who live in L.A., and Skye, who is moving there.
Merida joined the Pulitzer Prize Board in 2020.
Viet Thanh Nguyen is a University Professor, Aerol Arnold Chair of English, and Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (Oxford University Press, 2002) and the novel The Sympathizer, from Grove/Atlantic (2015). The Sympathizer won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, an Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America, the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the American Library Association, le Prix du meilleur livre étranger (Best Foreign Book in France), a California Book Award, and the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature in Fiction from the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association. It was also a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. The novel made it to over thirty book-of-the-year lists, including The Guardian, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Amazon.com, Slate.com, and The Washington Post. The foreign rights have been sold to twenty-seven countries.
He is also the author of Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War from Harvard University Press (2016, foreign rights to four countries), which is the critical bookend to a creative project whose fictional bookend is The Sympathizer. Nothing Ever Dies, a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction, examines how the so-called Vietnam War has been remembered by many countries and people, from the US to Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and South Korea. Kirkus Reviews calls the book “a powerful reflection on how we choose to remember and forget.” It has won the the John G. Cawelti Award for Best Textbook/Primer from the Popular Culture Association/ American Culture Association and the Réné Wellek Prize for the Best Book in Comparative Literature from the American Comparative Literature Association. Foreign rights have been sold to four countries.
His current book is The Committed, the sequel to The Sympathizer.
Other books include The Refugees, a short story collection from Grove Press (2017, foreign rights to fourteen countries), and The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives, which he edited. He has written for The New York Times, Time, The Guardian, The Atlantic, and other venues. Along with Janet Hoskins, he co-edited Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field (University of Hawaii Press, 2014). His articles have appeared in numerous journals and books, including PMLA, American Literary History, Western American Literature, positions: east asia cultures critique, The New Centennial Review, Postmodern Culture, the Japanese Journal of American Studies, and Asian American Studies After Critical Mass. Many of his articles can be downloaded here. Most recently, he has also edited the Library of America volume for Maxine Hong Kingston, his former teacher.
He has been a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (2011-2012), the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard (2008-2009) and the Fine Arts Work Center (2004-2005). He has also received residencies, fellowships, and grants from the Luce Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Asian Cultural Council, the James Irvine Foundation, the Huntington Library, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Creative Capital and the Warhol Foundation. Most recently he has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, appointed as a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture, and received honorary doctorates from Uppsala University, Colgate University, and Franklin and Marshall College.
His teaching and service awards include the Mellon Mentoring Award for Faculty Mentoring Graduate Students, the Albert S. Raubenheimer Distinguished Junior Faculty Award for outstanding research, teaching and service, the General Education Teaching Award, and the Resident Faculty of the Year Award. Multimedia has been a key part of his teaching. In a recent course on the American War in Viet Nam, he and his students created An Other War Memorial, which won a grant from the Fund for Innovative Undergraduate Teaching and the USC Provost’s Prize for Teaching with Technology. It is also archived at the USC Library.
Nguyen joined the Pulitzer Prize Board in 2020.
Emily Ramshaw is the co-founder and CEO of The 19th. She was previously editor-in-chief of The Texas Tribune, an award-winning nonpartisan digital news startup that now boasts the largest statehouse reporting bureau in the country and the nation’s most successful business model for local news. A Washington, D.C., native, Emily started her career at The Dallas Morning News. She is the youngest member of the board of the Pulitzer Prize. A graduate of Northwestern University, Emily lives with her husband and daughter in Austin.
Ramshaw joined the Pulitzer Prize Board in 2016.
David Remnick has been the editor of The New Yorker since 1998 and a staff writer since 1992. He has written hundreds of pieces for the magazine, including reporting from Russia, the Middle East, and Europe and Profiles of Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Katharine Graham, Mike Tyson, Bruce Springsteen, Ralph Ellison, Philip Roth, Benjamin Netanyahu, Leonard Cohen, and Mavis Staples. He also serves as the host of the magazine’s national radio program and podcast, “The New Yorker Radio Hour.”
Remnick began his reporting career in 1982, as a staff writer at the Washington Post, where he covered stories for the Metro, Sports, and Style sections. In 1988, he started a four-year assignment as a Washington Post Moscow correspondent, an experience that formed the basis of his 1993 book, “Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire.” In 1994, “Lenin’s Tomb” received both the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction and a George Polk Award for excellence in journalism.
Under Remnick’s leadership, The New Yorker has become the country’s most honored magazine. It has won more than fifty National Magazine Awards during his tenure, including multiple citations for general excellence. In 2016, The New Yorker became the first magazine to receive a Pulitzer Prize for its writing, and now has won six Pulitzers, including the gold medal for public service. Remnick was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2016.
Remnick has written seven books: “Lenin’s Tomb,” “Resurrection: The Struggle for a New Russia,” “King of the World” (a biography of Muhammad Ali), and “The Bridge” (a biography of Barack Obama), along with “The Devil Problem,” “Reporting,” and “Holding the Note,” which are collections of some of his pieces from the magazine. He has also edited or co-edited many anthologies of New Yorker articles, including “The Matter of Black Lives,” “The Fragile Earth,” “Life Stories,” “Wonderful Town,” “The New Gilded Age,” “Fierce Pajamas,” “Disquiet, Please!,” and “Secret Ingredients.”
Remnick has taught at Princeton University, where he received his B.A., in 1981, and at Columbia University. He lives in New York with his wife, Esther Fein; they have three children, Alex, Noah, and Natasha.
Remnick joined the Pulitzer Prize Board in 2019.
Tommie Shelby is an Africana studies scholar whose writings focus on racial and economic justice and on the history of black political thought. He is the Caldwell Titcomb Professor of African and African American Studies and of Philosophy at Harvard.
Shelby’s first book, "We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity" (2005), explores the relationship between race, identity, solidarity and justice through a philosophical reconsideration of leading African American thinkers from the era of slavery to the post-Jim Crow era. He coedited "Hip Hop and Philosophy: Rhyme 2 Reason" (2005), which brings the classic debates of Western philosophy to a general audience through the idiom of hip-hop culture, and "To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr." (2018).
He is also the author of "Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform" (2016). Characterized by Columbia University philosopher Robert Gooding-Williams as "a major, groundbreaking contribution to both philosophical and public policy discourse about the ghetto poor," it received the 2016 Book Award from the North American Society for Social Philosophy.
Shelby’s numerous academic articles have appeared in journals such as Philosophy & Public Affairs, Ethics, Political Theory, Critical Inquiry, Du Bois Review and Daedalus. He has also written for The New York Times Book Review, Boston Review, The Root and The Chronicle of Higher Education. From 2006 to 2014, he was co-editor of Transition, a literary and cultural magazine with a focus on Africa and its Diaspora.
A native of Jacksonville, Fla., Shelby received his B.A. from Florida A&M University and Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh. He began his academic career as an assistant professor of philosophy at The Ohio State University. He has been on the faculty at Harvard since 2000.
Shelby is married to the writer and editor Jessie Scanlon. They live with their daughter and son in Cambridge, Mass.
Shelby joined the Pulitzer Prize Board in 2015.