Hearing a writer or artist discuss his or her work, watching a scene from a play or listening to a piece of music brings words on a page or notes in a score to life. Each of the 2017 Pulitzer winners in Letters, Drama and Music has conducted interviews, read poetry, or seen work produced on stage.
In August 2016, Oprah Winfrey's network OWN posted a clip of Winfrey interviewing Colson Whitehead, who went on to win the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for "Underground Railroad."
The following month, in September 2016, Ta-Nehisi Coates spoke to Heather Ann Thompson at Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College. The two discussed Thompson's "Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy," which won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in History.
New York City's Museum of Modern Art hosted the 2017 Pulitzer winner in Poetry, Tyehimba Jess, in conjunction with its exhibition "One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North." Listen to Jess read here.
Matthew Desmond was awarded the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction for "Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City." Jeffrey Brown of PBS NewsHour spoke to Desmond about the book.
Hisham Matar spoke about his Pulitzer-winning memoir "The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between" with Channel 4 News.
"It was a beautiful country, and it still is a beautiful country," he said of Libya to open the conversation.
Lynn Nottage won her second Drama Pulitzer in 2017, for "Sweat" (the first went to "Ruined" in 2009).
This year's Music Pulitzer winner, Du Yun, was commended for "Angel's Bone." The Pulitzer Board described it as, "a bold operatic work that integrates vocal and instrumental elements and a wide range of styles into a harrowing allegory for human trafficking in the modern world."