FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Media Contacts:
Mike Pride, [email protected], (212) 854-7327
Sabina Lee, [email protected], (212) 854-5579
NEW YORK, N.Y. (Oct. 29, 2015) — Neil Brown, editor and vice president of the Tampa Bay Times, and Tommie Shelby, a philosopher, Africana studies scholar and professor at Harvard University, have been elected to the Pulitzer Prize Board, Columbia University announced today.
Brown oversees the journalism published in the Times, the largest circulation daily in the Southeast, as well as on the websites tampabay.com and PolitiFact.com, in the daily tabloid tbt*, and in Bay, a bimonthly magazine on fashion and real estate.
A native of Chicago, Brown began his career as a reporter at the Miami Herald, covering government and politics in Key West, West Palm Beach, Tallahassee and Miami.
In 1988, he joined Times Publishing Company as managing editor of Congressional Quarterly, a former Times affiliate in Washington, D.C. He directed the CQ newsroom in a first-of-its-kind special report "Where the Money Goes," which was a finalist for a National Magazine Award.
In 1993, Brown joined the then St. Petersburg Times as national/foreign editor. He was promoted to managing editor and executive editor, becoming editor in 2010. He was named to Times Publishing’s board of directors in 1997 and became a vice president in 2001.
During Brown’s leadership of the newsroom, the Times has won more national and state awards than at any time in its history, including five Pulitzer Prizes.
In a time of great business transformation, Brown has sought innovative collaborations to expand enterprise and accountability journalism. Most notable has been an ambitious expansion of fact-check journalism through the Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning PolitiFact.com.
Brown is a past president of the Florida Society of News Editors, and served six years on the board of the American Society of News Editors. He is a four-time Pulitzer Prize juror.
Brown graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Iowa in 1981 with a bachelor’s degree in political science and journalism. In 2010, he was inducted into the Hall of Fame at the university’s School of Journalism and Communications.
He lives in St. Petersburg with his wife, Iranian author and journalist Gelareh Asayesh. Their two children are in college.
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 Professor 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. He is currently completing a book on black urban poverty entitled Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform.
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.
Brown and Shelby were elected to three-year terms on the 19-member board, which annually chooses the winners of the Pulitzer Prizes in journalism, books, drama and music in April. Board members serve a maximum of nine years.
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 journalists or news executives from media outlets across the U.S., as well as five academics or persons in the arts. 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.