3 Academics Win Pulitzer Prizes for the Arts

Three academics at American universities were among Monday’s winners of 2024 Pulitzer Prizes for their literary or musical achievements, as announced by the prize’s board.

Among the recipients are:

• Jacqueline Jones, winner of the Pulitzer in history for No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era (Basic Books), which the board described as a “breathtakingly original reconstruction of free Black life in Boston that profoundly reshapes our understanding of the city’s abolitionist legacy and the challenging reality for its Black residents.” Jones is a professor emerita and the Ellen C. Temple Chair in Women’s History and Mastin Gentry White Professor of Southern History at the University of Texas at Austin.
• Cristina Rivera Garza, winner of the Pulitzer in autobiography for Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice (Hogarth), a “genre-bending account of the author’s 20-year-old sister, murdered by a former boyfriend, that mixes memoir, feminist investigative journalism and poetic biography stitched together with a determination born of loss.” Rivera Garza is the M.D. Anderson Professor in Hispanic Studies and director of the creative writing program in Hispanic Studies at the University of Houston.
• Tyshawn Sorey, winner of the Pulitzer in music for Adagio (For Wadada Leo Smith), “an introspective saxophone concerto with a wide range of textures presented in a slow tempo, a beautiful homage that’s quietly intense, treasuring intimacy rather than spectacle.” Sorey is the Presidential Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania.