Congratulations to our 2018 Pulitzer Prize Winners James Forman Jr. and Frank Bidart! Enter for a chance to win a set of both Pulitzer-winning books: Locking Up Our Own (winner for General Nonfiction), and Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016 (winner for Poetry). Sorry, US residents only.
Winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction
Locking Up Our Own
James Forman Jr.’s book Locking Up Our Own is the winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction. His masterful investigation of America’s criminal justice system seeks to understand how and why many African American leaders in the nation’s urban centers embraced 1970s tough-on-crime measures which ultimately had devastating consequences for poor black neighborhoods. Riveting and compassionate, Forman’s work is an essential contribution to the increasingly urgent debate over race and incarceration in the United States. The Prize’s judges described the book as “An examination of the historical roots of contemporary criminal justice in the U.S., based on vast experience and deep knowledge of the legal system, and its often-devastating consequences for citizens and communities of color.”
Winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry
Half-light
Frank Bidart was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his book Half-light, poems penned between 1965 and 2016 that are at once visionary and revelatory, intimate and unguarded, offering a radical confrontation with human nature. Few writers have so willingly ventured to the dark places of the human psyche and allowed themselves to be stripped bare on the page with such candor and vulnerability. The Prize’s judges described it 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.”
We are so proud to publish these powerful and pressing voices.
James Forman Jr. is a professor of law at Yale Law School. He has written for The New York Times,, The Atlantic, numerous law reviews, and other publications. A former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, he spent six years as a public defender in Washington, D.C., where he cofounded the Maya Angelou Public Charter School.
Frank Bidart is the author of Metaphysical Dog (FSG, 2013), Watching the Spring Festival (FSG, 2008), Star Dust (FSG, 2005), Desire (FSG, 1997), and In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90 (FSG, 1990). He has won many prizes, including the Wallace Stevens Award, the 2007 Bollingen Prize in American Poetry, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He teaches at Wellesley College and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.