Academics Among Pulitzer Winners

Several academics were among the winners of the arts and letters Pulitzer Prizes announced Monday.

• Frank Bidart, the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and a professor of English at Wellesley College, was awarded the Pulitzer in poetry for Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which the Pulitzer committee described as a "volume of unyielding ambition and remarkable scope that mixes long dramatic poems with short elliptical lyrics, building on classical mythology and reinventing forms of desires that defy societal norms."
• Jack E. Davis, a professor of history at the University of Florida, won the Pulitzer in history for The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea (Liveright/W. W. Norton), an "important environmental history" of Earth’s 10th-largest body of water.
• James Forman Jr., a professor of law at Yale University, received the Pulitzer in general nonfiction for Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), an examination of the U.S. criminal justice system.

The winner of the drama Pulitzer, Martyna Majok, has taught playwriting at Williams College, Wesleyan University and the State University of New York at Purchase, and is a 2018-19 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University.