Ann Marie Lipinski remarks

Pulitzer Awards Ceremony
Monday, May 23, 2011
Columbia University

Some years ago, following the death of my beloved maternal grandmother, I spent an afternoon reading her diaries. This was no breach. For as long as I could remember, my grandmother’s diary lay open upon her dining room table, as accessible to a visitor as her daily newspaper. In it she recorded the brief, essential facts of her day, in the precise order of their occurrence and without favor. She had a knack for holding the extraordinary in equal measure to the everyday—news of my brother’s birth paired comfortably with a grocery trip to the A&P.

Today’s gathering puts me in mind of one such entry. I do not think she would mind if I read it to you.

“March 31, 1988: 88 (degrees). Had a tint and a hairdo, also had eye brows plucked. Great news from Helen! Ann Marie called—she won a pulitzer prize. We’re very happy for her.”

I do not know what any of you were doing when word of your Pulitzer reached you, but I’m guessing that the news turned an ordinary day into an extraordinary one, and forever sealed your membership in what former Pulitzer Board chairman Skip Gates called the “aristocracy of excellence.” In Columbia’s annual printing of a soft cover compendium titled, simply, “The Pulitzer Prizes,” your names now join the ranks of other giants of journalism, letters, and music, American nobility including Robert Frost, August Wilson, Eudora Welty, Mike Royko, Samuel Barber, and Katherine Graham.

But these are not ranks into which you are born, nor does stature or wealth add a thumb to the Pulitzer scale. Were I to quibble with Skip, a privilege I enjoyed while we served on the board together, I would wonder whether “meritocracy of excellence” was more apt, recognition of the extraordinary industry and creativity which earned you a place at this ceremony.

Prize-giving is a fickle business, not determined by the precision of a stopwatch or scoreboard. The winners gathered here are the beneficiaries of the judgment of 19 arbiters, scrupulous and exacting judges to be sure, but human and guided by their own tastes and fancies. But that is not the same as arbitrary. There are qualities that endure, historic hallmarks of Pulitzer-worthy work that the board holds ever tightly even while expanding the eligibility rules. It was those qualities that distinguished the winners, whether traditional or multi-media, and that the board found abundant in your work.

Read the stories of government officials engorged on enormous pay packages or the medical mystery of a young boy racing against disease and renew your admiration for journalism that is probing and moral. Travel to Russia for a master class in foreign correspondence and criminal justice reporting and rediscover the meaning of dogged, both in print and online. Behold feature writing as forensics, an exacting reexamination of forgotten fatalities at sea animated by a playwright’s sense of timing. Meet anew the nation’s first president, and be reminded of how the familiar can be transporting in the hands of a biographer fortified by insight and scholarship. Stand in awe of a novelist’s meticulous braiding of lives across the wreckage of time and marvel at a skill that, in one chapter, renders even PowerPoint as literature.

In another moment President Bollinger will award you the tangible evidence of your prize and with that I offer but two more thoughts. Not long after I hung the Pulitzer certificate as evidence of my fortune, I came home to find my husband had placed into the frame a competing commemorative notice—a form letter from the Illinois Secretary of State’s office congratulating me on my safe driving record. If you are lucky, as I was, there are people in your life to keep you humble. Those are likely people who made some sacrifice in support of your work, and to those spouses, children, friends and colleagues, we offer our very deep gratitude.

Lastly, the late Howard Simons, former Nieman curator and managing editor of the Washington Post, used to warn Pulitzer winners against playing out their careers trying to repeat their grand slam with every at bat (advice, by the way, clearly ignored by photographer Carol Guzy of the Post, who today is awarded her fourth Pulitzer, a record for a journalist). While it was the clear intent of Joseph Pulitzer that the prize be a beacon offering both model and reward, it is also true that lots of great work goes unrewarded. An author I know recently admired a book as the one that he most wished he had written. It’s one of my favorites too and was a finalist for a Pulitzer but did not win, a fact that has never tarnished the book’s luster.

It did achieve the only thing that is in the creator’s control, what Amanda Bennett, the recent past co-chair of the board, holds as the standard for her reporters: producing journalism that may or may not win Pulitzers, but is worthy of Pulitzers.

Who can write again the script that got them here? It would be lovely to see you back in the Lowe Library some spring, but joyous still to read more of the kind of work that got you here today. For that is hard enough and the true legacy of Pulitzer.

Kay Ryan, our poetry winner, wrote a poem called “The Job.” It says:
Imagine that
the job were
so delicate
that you could
seldom—almost
never—remember
it. Impossible
work, really.
Like placing
pebbles exactly
where they were
already. The
steadiness it
takes . . . and
to what end?
It’s so easy
to forget again.

On behalf of the members of the Pulitzer Board, and with great personal admiration, I congratulate you all on work so very well done.
Thank you.