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This year's Pulitzer Prize winners include a number of writers affiliated with U.S. colleges and universities. They include:
Percival Everett, who won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for James, which the Pulitzer board described as “an accomplished reconsideration of Huckleberry Finn that gives agency to Jim to illustrate the absurdity of racial supremacy and provide a new take on the search for family and freedom.” Everett is a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
Edda Fields-Black, who was awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in History for Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War, which the board called “a richly-textured and revelatory account of a slave rebellion that brought 756 enslaved people to freedom in a single day, weaving military strategy and family history with the transition from bondage to freedom.” Fields-Black teaches history at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
Kathleen DuVal, who won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in History for Native Nations: A Millennium in North America, “a panoramic portrait of Native American nations and communities over a thousand years, a vivid and accessible account of their endurance, ingenuity and achievement in the face of conflict and dispossession,” the board wrote. DuVal is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Marie Howe, who won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for New and Selected Poems, which the committee described as “a collection drawn from decades of work that mines the day-to-day modern experience for evidence of our shared loneliness, mortality and holiness.” Howe teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, who was awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Drama for Purpose, “a play about the complex dynamics and legacy of an upper middle class African-American family whose patriarch was a key figure in the Civil Rights Movement, a skillful blend of drama and comedy that probes how different generations define heritage,” as the Pulitzer board wrote. Jacobs-Jenkins teaches at Yale University.
Benjamin Nathans, who won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction for To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement, which the Pulitzer board described as “a prodigiously researched and revealing history of Soviet dissent, how it was repeatedly put down and came to life again, populated by a sprawling cast of courageous people dedicated to fighting for threatened freedoms and hard-earned rights.” Nathans is the Alan Charles Kors Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania.
