Sig Gissler has been administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes since 2002. A longtime faculty member at Columbia's Journalism School, he is the former editor of the Milwaukee Journal. During his 25 years with the paper, he served as reporter, editorial page editor and associate editor before becoming editor in 1985. Gissler left the paper in 1993 to become a senior fellow at the Freedom Forum's Media Studies Center, exploring media coverage of race.

A playwright and educator, Quiara Alegría Hudes won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play Water by the Spoonful. Variety hailed the play as “a combination poem, prayer and app on how to cope in an age of uncertainty, speed and chaos.”

As executive editor of The Miami Herald, Aminda Marqués Gonzalez has oversight and responsibility for the newspaper’s print and online news operation, which reaches 1.2 million readers a week.

After a distinguished 20-year career at The Washington Post, rising from general assignment reporter to managing editor, Steve Coll joined The New Yorker staff in 2005. The author of seven books, he has also served as president of the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan research and public policy institution, since 2007. He plans to step down as foundation president after a successor is selected. Coll has twice received the Pulitzer Prize, once for Explanatory Reporting, for a series of Washington Post articles that he co-authored with David A.

Paul C. Tash is the chairman and CEO of the Tampa Bay Times and the Times Publishing Company, St. Petersburg, Fla.

A native of South Bend, Indiana, Tash graduated summa cum laude from Indiana University in 1976. He received a Marshall Scholarship and graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor of laws degree from Edinburgh University in Scotland in 1978.

Steven Hahn, the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, has written extensively about the American South, African-American history and the international history of slavery, emancipation and race. In 2004, he won the Pulitzer Prize for history for A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration.

Robert Blau, a New York City native, has carved an eclectic path up the journalistic ranks. He wrote about music, reviewed movies and covered the police beat, before turning his attention to investigative reporting and editing. Following a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University in 1997, he began overseeing all major enterprise at the Chicago Tribune, including its years-long probe of the failures of the criminal justice system in Illinois, which yielded numerous reforms and was emulated by news organizations across the country.

A creative writing professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Junot Díaz won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his best-selling first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

The Pulitzer Board described the work as “a dazzling, richly layered novel about an overweight, nerdy Dominican-American teenager who comes of age in a multi-generational immigrant family, devouring comic books, spinning fantasies and searching for love.”