article by Sarah A. Harvard via mic.com
The Pulitzer Prize committee announced its 2017 winners at its 101st annual ceremony on Monday. Among the 21 winners of the prestigious literary award, four black writers were commended for their work. BuzzFeed News’ executive editor Saeed Jones tweeted that Tyehimba Jess, Hilton Als, Lynn Nottage and Colson Whitehead were among the new class of winners.
Jess won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Olio, a collection of his sonnets, songs and narratives that highlight the lives of “unrecorded African-American performers” before the Civil War up to World War I.
Nottage won the Pulitzer Prize in drama for her Broadway show Sweat. The play, a political drama, centers on a group of friends who spent most of their lives working with each other in a factory and follows their friendship’s tumultuous friendship as rumors of layoffs begin to stir. According to Playbill, Nottage is the first female playwright to win the Pulitzer Prize twice. Nottage tweeted out thank yous for her award.
Whitehead won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for his 2016 novel The Underground Railroad. The novel tells the story of a teenage heroine, Cora, in 1850s Georgia who tries to escape a cotton plantation and start her journey toward freedom.
Als, a theater critic for the New Yorker, won a Pulitzer Prize in criticism.
Source: 2017 Pulitzer Prize Winners: 4 black writers take home the coveted award
article by Hillel Italie via blackamericaweb.com
NEW YORK (AP) — Nobel laureate Toni Morrison has received an honorary prize named for another Nobel winner, the late Saul Bellow.
PEN America, the literary and human rights organization, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that Morrison has been given the $25,000 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American fiction. Morrison, 85, is known for such novels as “Beloved,” ”Song of Solomon” and “Jazz.”
“Revelatory, intelligent, bold, her fiction is invested in the black experience, in black lives, and in black consciousness, material from which she has forged a singular American aesthetic,” awards judge Louise Erdrich, herself a prize-winning novelist, said in a statement. “Toni Morrison not only opened doors to others when she began to publish, she has also stayed grounded in the issues of her time.”
PEN announced several other prizes on Tuesday.
Lisa Ko’s “The Leavers” won the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, a $25,000 award. John Schulian, a sports writer for numerous publications, received the $5,000 PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing. Ed Roberson was given the $5,000 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry.
Three playwrights received prizes: Lynn Nottage, whose works include the Pulitzer-winning “Ruined,” was named a Master American Dramatist; Young Jean Lee was cited as an American Playwright in Mid-Career and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins as an Emerging American Playwright.
To read more, go to: http://blackamericaweb.com/2016/03/01/toni-morrison-receives-25000-honorary-award-from-pen/