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The 2022 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Biography
For a distinguished biography, autobiography or memoir by an American author, Fifteen thousand dollars ($15,000).

Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South, by the late Winfred Rembert as told to Erin I. Kelly (Bloomsbury)

A searing first-person illustrated account of an artist’s life during the 1950s and 1960s in an unreconstructed corner of the deep South–an account of abuse, endurance, imagination, and aesthetic transformation.

Winfred Rembert, Jr., Patsy Rembert and Erin I. Kelly accept the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Biography from Columbia University President Lee Bollinger. (Eileen Barroso/Columbia University)

Winning Work

Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South

By

the late Winfred Rembert as told to Erin I. Kelly

 

Booklist #1 Nonfiction Book of the Year * African American Literary Book Club (AALBC) #1 Nonfiction Bestseller * Named a Best Book of the Year by: NPR, Publishers Weekly, BookPage, Barnes & Noble, Hudson Booksellers, ARTnews, and more * Amazon Editors' Pick * Carnegie Medal of Excellence in Nonfiction Longlist

"A compelling and important history that this nation desperately needs to hear." -Bryan Stevenson, New York Times bestselling author of Just Mercy and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative

Winfred Rembert grew up in a family of Georgia field laborers and joined the Civil Rights Movement as a teenager. He was arrested after fleeing a demonstration, survived a near-lynching at the hands of law enforcement, and spent seven years on chain gangs. During that time he met the undaunted Patsy, who would become his wife. Years later, at the age of fifty-one and with Patsy's encouragement, he started drawing and painting scenes from his youth using leather tooling skills he learned in prison.

Chasing Me to My Grave presents Rembert's breathtaking body of work alongside his story, as told to Tufts philosopher Erin I. Kelly. Rembert calls forth vibrant scenes of Black life on Cuthbert, Georgia's Hamilton Avenue, where he first glimpsed the possibility of a life outside the cotton field. As he pays tribute, exuberant and heartfelt, to Cuthbert's Black community and the people, including Patsy, who helped him to find the courage to revisit a traumatic past, Rembert brings to life the promise and the danger of Civil Rights protest, the brutalities of incarceration, his search for his mother's love, and the epic bond he found with Patsy.

Vivid, confrontational, revelatory, and complex, Chasing Me to My Grave is a searing memoir in prose and painted leather that celebrates Black life and summons readers to confront painful and urgent realities at the heart of American history and society.

Biography

Winfred Rembert (1945 - 2021) was an artist from Cuthbert, Georgia. His paintings on carved and tooled leather have been exhibited at museums and galleries across the country, and compared to the work of Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, and Horace Pippin. Rembert was honored by the Equal Justice Initiative in 2015, awarded a United States Artists Barr Fellowship in 2016, and is the subject of two award-winning documentary films: All Me and Ashes to Ashes. In the last decades of his life, he lived and worked in New Haven, Connecticut.

Erin I. Kelly is professor of philosophy at Tufts University. She lives in Massachusetts.

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Biography in 2022:

Janice P. Nimura

An engrossing dual biography of two sisters who were among the first women in America to receive medical degrees–a complex and sympathetic portrait that sees their struggle to be taken seriously as physicians as a pivotal moment in women’s history.

Richard Zenith

A sparkling and imaginative rendering of the life of the Portuguese writer whose eclectic body of work probed the nature of the writerly self through its use of multiple literary personae.

The Jury

Peniel Joseph(Chair)

Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values, University of Texas at Austin

Heather Clark

Professor of Contemporary Poetry, University of Huddersfield

Noah Feldman

Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Harvard University

Eleanor Randolph

Contributing Writer, The New York Times

Samanth Subramanian

Writer and Journalist, London

Winners in Biography

2021

the late Les Payne and Tamara Payne

A powerful and revelatory account of the civil rights activist, built from dozens of interviews, offering insight into his character, beliefs and the forces that shaped him.
2020

Benjamin Moser

An authoritatively constructed work told with pathos and grace, that captures the writer’s genius and humanity alongside her addictions, sexual ambiguities and volatile enthusiasms.
2019

Jeffrey C. Stewart

A panoramic view of the personal trials and artistic triumphs of the father of the Harlem Renaissance and the movement he inspired.
2018

Caroline Fraser

A deeply researched and elegantly written portrait of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House on the Prairie series, that describes how Wilder transformed her family’s story of poverty, failure and struggle into an uplifting tale of self-reliance, familial love and perseverance.
See All Biography

2022 Prize Winners

Feature Writing

Jennifer Senior of The Atlantic

For an unflinching portrait of a family’s reckoning with loss in the 20 years since 9/11, masterfully braiding the author's personal connection to the story with sensitive reporting that reveals the long reach of grief.
See All 2022 Winners