A hearty congratulations to James Forman Jr. and Frank Bidart, who have been awarded 2018 Pulitzer Prizes!
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.”
Finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction
Notes on a Foreign Country
Suzy Hansen’s book Notes on a Foreign Country is a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction. The book details Hansen’s years living in Istanbul after leaving America behind. Blending memoir, journalism, and history, and deeply attuned to the voices of those she met on her travels, Notes on a Foreign Country shares a powerful journey of self-discovery and revelation. The Prize’s judges described the book as “a brave and disturbing account of what it means to be an American in the world during the first decades of the 21st century.”
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.
Suzy Hansen is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine and has written for many other publications. In 2007, she was awarded a fellowship from the Institute of Current World Affairs to do research in Turkey. She currently lives in Istanbul. Notes on a Foreign Country is her first book.
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