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.

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.”

Eugene Robinson is a columnist and associate editor of The Washington Post, where he has worked since 1980. His twice-weekly column on the paper’s op-ed page debuted in February 2005 and is now syndicated by the Washington Post Writers Group to 262 newspapers.

In 2009, Robinson won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for his columns about the 2008 presidential campaign and the election of President Barack Obama.

Keven Ann Willey, a native of Washington, D.C., became vice president and editorial page editor of The Dallas Morning News in November 2002. Her editorial department’s Bridging Dallas' North-South Gap advocacy won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. Her department's four-year campaign to amend the state constitution to require legislators to publicly record their votes by name was a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize.

Randell Beck, as the prize-winning executive editor of the Argus Leader from 2001 to 2008, led his newspaper through numerous public service, investigative and First Amendment projects. Those included a legal battle that resulted in a landmark state Supreme Court ruling in 2005 unsealing more than 200 criminal pardons issued secretly by the governor of South Dakota.

Stephen Engelberg became ProPublica's editor-in-chief on Jan. 1, 2013. He oversees its day-to-day editorial operations, long-term projects and Web strategy. During his time as managing editor, ProPublica became the first online news organization to win Pulitzer Prizes. In 2010, it won the Investigative Reporting prize for chronicling the life-and-death decisions by a hospital’s exhausted doctors when they were isolated by the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina.

Joyce Dehli, Vice President of Lee Enterprises, joined the Pulitzer Prize Board in May, 2008.

Lee Enterprises publishes 54 daily newspapers and their Web sites. They include the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson, the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison, and other mid-size and small newspapers.

With nearly 30 years of service with The Wall Street Journal, Paul Gigot has been the paper's editorial page editor and vice president since September 2001. He is responsible for the newspaper's editorials, op-ed articles and Leisure & Arts criticism and directs the editorial pages of the Journal's Asian and European editions and the OpinionJournal.com web-site. He is also the host of the weekly half-hour news program, the Journal Editorial Report, on the Fox News Channel.

Danielle Allen is a scholar whose intellectual scope spans the fields of the classics, philosophy, and political theory. Her book The World of Prometheus: The Politics of Punishing in Democratic Athens examines the theory and practice of punishment in classical Athens as it affected both the intellectual elite and ordinary citizens. Allen weaves evidence from legal statutes and court speeches with contemporaneous literary and philosophical documents to explore the challenges posed by punishment to democratic Athenian politics and society.

Lee C. Bollinger is a renowned legal scholar, with an expertise in free speech and the First Amendment. He is an alumnus of Columbia's Law School, where he is also a professor. He became president of Columbia University on June 1, 2002.