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New York, N.Y. (Nov. 7, 2013) Katherine Boo, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, and Gail Collins, an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, have been elected to the Pulitzer Prize Board.
Boo, a 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, D.C., 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."
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.
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, D.C., 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 McArthur "genius" award. She is married to Sunil Khilnani, a writer and professor who directs the King’s India Institute at King’s College London.
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.
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The Pulitzer Prizes, which are administered at Columbia University, were established by Joseph Pulitzer, a Hungarian-American journalist and newspaper publisher, who left money to Columbia University upon his death in 1911. A portion of his bequest was used to found the School of Journalism in 1912 and establish the Pulitzer Prizes, which were first awarded in 1917.
The 19-member board is composed mainly of leading editors or news executives from media outlets across the U.S., as well as five non-journalists. The dean of Columbia's journalism school and the administrator of the prizes are nonvoting members. The chair rotates annually to the most senior member or members. The board is self-perpetuating in the election of members. Voting members may serve three terms of three years for a total of nine years.