Two works printed by The New Yorker acquired Pulitzer Prizes on Monday, putting them among the many 12 months’s high achievements in journalism, letters, music, and drama.
Sarah Stillman, a workers author, gained within the explanatory-reporting class for her illuminating investigation of felony homicide, a draconian authorized doctrine that has despatched 1000’s of People—disproportionately younger and Black—to jail, generally for all times, for killings they didn’t commit. “It’s really one of many cruellest concepts within the American authorized system,” one particular person informed Stillman. “And most of the people don’t even comprehend it exists.”
In its quotation, the Pulitzer committee praised Stillman’s “searing indictment” of “the felony-murder cost and its disparate penalties, usually devastating, for communities of shade.”
The New Yorker’s different winner, Medar de la Cruz, acquired the Pulitzer within the illustrated-reporting-and-commentary class for “The Diary of a Rikers Island Library Employee,” which takes readers inside New York Metropolis’s largest jail complicated. De la Cruz’s evocative drawings depict his deliveries of books to incarcerated individuals, providing the general public a uncommon glimpse inside Rikers, the place cameras and telephones are banned and detainees are topic to situations which were harshly criticized by authorized and human-rights organizations. “I’m all the time moved by the sense of gratitude and heat that some individuals specific once we’re capable of get them the books that they requested for,” de la Cruz writes.
In honoring de la Cruz, the Pulitzer board cited his “daring black-and-white photographs that humanize the prisoners and workers by way of their starvation for books.”
Stillman has written for The New Yorker since 2011, on matters together with human trafficking, the drug commerce, and labor situations at factories abroad. Her work has acquired two Nationwide Journal Awards, two George Polk Awards, and a Hillman Prize for Journal Journalism. Stillman, a 2016 MacArthur Fellow, teaches investigative reporting at Yale and created the World Migration Undertaking at Columbia College’s Graduate Faculty of Journalism.
De la Cruz, a graduate of the ArtCenter Faculty of Design, teaches visible communications at neighborhood workshops in New York Metropolis and is engaged on a graphic novel about his experiences on Rikers Island. His Pulitzer-winning New Yorker contribution was his first submission to the publication.
Along with Stillman and de la Cruz, 4 New Yorker contributors have been acknowledged by the Pulitzer committee. The workers author Jay Caspian Kang was named a finalist within the commentary class for columns in regards to the gulf between real-world injustices and the way they’re publicly mentioned, together with essays in regards to the failed promise of affirmative motion for Asian People and the racial politics of the N.B.A.
The workers author Vinson Cunningham was named a finalist within the criticism class for theatre critiques that mixed astute stage evaluation with poignant reflections on life and loss of life, artwork and politics, and identification and race. In recognizing Cunningham, the Pulitzer committee thought-about critiques of an unconventional Central Park manufacturing of “Hamlet” and a Broadway comedy about West African immigrants in a Harlem hair salon.
Angie Wang, a finalist within the illustrated-reporting class, was honored for an imaginative Sketchbook that contrasted the language-development expertise of ChatGPT with these of her younger son.
Justin Chang, who joined the publication’s workers in February, gained within the criticism class for his writing about movie on the Los Angeles Instances.
With its 2024 awards, The New Yorker has gained eight Pulitzer Prizes, together with the gold medal for public service. Magazines grew to become eligible for Pulitzer consideration beginning in 2014. ♦
