Kathleen Carroll remarks

Pulitzer Awards Ceremony
Monday, May 23, 2011
Columbia University

What an incredible pleasure it is to be with all of you on this glorious day of celebration. And on behalf of the Pulitzer Prize Board, let me offer you the warmest congratulations on your achievements.

The Pulitzer Prize has been around a while _ the first ones were awarded in 1917 _ and a few traditions have grown up over the years.

One is this lovely luncheon under the Rotunda of the Low Memorial Library. Here, glasses clink, hugs are exchanged and everyone is enveloped in a warm fuzzy glow.

About that glow. You might go easy on the bubbly until after you have to navigate the steps to the stage and have your photo snapped with President Bollinger.

Those photos, you know, will live on the Pulitzer web site forever.

Second, and perhaps you’ve already noticed this, a Pulitzer Prize coming with naming rights. From this day forward you will no longer be Joe Smith and Jane Brown. You will be Pulitzer-Prize winner Joe Smith and the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Jane Brown.

And once you’ve attained that hyphenated state, you’ll be asked to give back; participating in a Pulitzer seminar or perhaps serving on one of the hardworking juries that vet the hundreds of entries submitted each year for consideration.

The arts jurors work for the better part of the year, reading hundreds of books, listening to hours of music and watching dozens of new theater works.

They collaborate, sometimes vigorously but always collegially, to identify the three best works in each of the categories _ fiction, non-fiction, history, biography, poetry, drama and music.

The journalism jurors gather here at Columbia each spring for three very long days to pore over hundreds of journalism entries in local, national, international, explanatory, investigative and breaking news reporting, in feature writing, commentary, criticism, editorial writing, cartooning, feature photography, news photography and Public Service, the only prize that always goes to an entire news organization rather than individuals.

Those juries also put forward three finalists in each category.

That collection of finalists then goes to the Pulitzer board members who spend several months reading and contemplating the work until we get together in April to discuss and vote on the winners.

For each of us fortunate enough to serve on the board, those two days are a joy, filled with thoughtful and reflective discussion of amazing journalistic and artistic work.

Those Pulitzer categories are not static. They have changed many times over the years and they will undoubtedly evolve more in the years to come.

But whatever the category, the work always captures one thing ... the sloppy, elegant, tragic, heroic mess of human existence.

Looking back over 94 years of Pulitzers, you can see how news events move off the front page and into the hard covers of books. They seep into plays and poems as we struggle to make sense of the acts of nature and the actions of man.

Year after year, journalism prizes are awarded for the coverage of death. The earth heaves and hundreds of thousands die. Deep inside a young mother, cells go haywire and disease takes her. Young men die fighting over land, ideals or even insults.

From this news coverage, we learn.

Then artists come along and bring us a new understanding. Death becomes an excruciating examination of loss in a play like "Rabbit Hole," in the poems of "Late Wife" and in fiction like "The Road."

In the past decade, awards have gone to the riveting photographs of war; devastation in the battlefield and on the home front. We have read about the soldiers and the ordinary people upon whose land they fight and we learned about once-secret policies invoked to staunch acts of terror. Winning books like "Ghost Wars" and “The Looming Tower,” examine the seeds of those conflicts and writers and artists will surely continue that examination for years to come.

Our evolving and imperfect views about race also permeate the work.

Slavery and the Civil War predate the prize but over and over, we strive for greater understanding of them with new research or fresh views in histories like "The Dred Scott Case" and "A Nation Under Our Feet," or the fictional story of a black family that comes apart when one member takes slaves in “A Known World.”

And Wynton Marsalis, squeezing the sound of pain through his trumpet in “Blood on the Fields,” his oratorio on slavery, gives us yet another way to learn.

In the 1920s, newspapers repeatedly won the prize for exposing or standing up to the insidious Klan. Eight decades later, the non-fiction work "The Race Beat," would explore how newspapers did, and did not, cover the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

Photographs from the era sear the images for us: James Meredith felled by shotgun blasts on a Mississippi road, back arched, his mouth howling in pain.

Journalists say they don’t like to repeat ideas but thankfully biographers and historians understand the need to examine events and people anew.

A biography of Andrew Jackson won the prize in 2009; so did one penned in 1938. Theodore Roosevelt was the subject of winning work in 1932 and 1980, his cousin FDR in 1949 and 1972.

Abraham Lincoln appears frequently, including this year, and may be central to winning work in the greatest number of categories; history, non-fiction and with the 1939 work “Abe Lincoln in Illinois,” in drama.

Those of us who work in non-fiction fields occasionally look with envy at the crafters of fiction, poetry, drama and music. We think “How lucky to be able to shape reality yourself...” knowing, of course, that creation is much harder when you don’t have all the characters and their actions handed to you.

The very best of those works can sometimes exposure reality more clearly than real life itself.

There is a scene in this year’s fiction winner, “A Visit from the Goon Squad,” in which two characters sitting at a table give up talking with each other and finish the conversation by typing at each other on their devices.

Anyone who has ever announced that dinner was ready by texting family members who are simply in another part of the house know that fictional scene is as real as it gets.

So let me close with one more small bit of advice: Enjoy this day.

Luxuriate in this celebration and savor all the people who are here, sharing it with you.

The work begins again soon enough, so for now, have a marvelous time.

And now, enjoy your lunch and as you wrap up dessert, Pulitzer Administrator Sig Gissler will be back to resume the rest of the program.

Thank you and good afternoon.