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Board lander photo
2025-26 Pulitzer Prize Board
Board lander photo caption
front row (sitting) left to right: N. Trethewey, C. Lozada, N. Carroll, N. Barnes, M. Miller, G. Chua; back row left to right: K. Lytle Hernández, V. T. Nguyen, A. Applebaum, J. Archibald, D. Remnick, J. Pace, V. Iyer, G. Escobar, G. Thompson, K. Merida (absent: J. Cobb). (Photo by Jose R. Lopez)
Board Lander Sub Title
Nancy Barnes and Nicole Carroll, co-chairs; Marjorie Miller, administrator

Kevin Sack

Publication
Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church
Citation
A sensitive exploration of a church massacre in Charleston, South Carolina, a rigorously researched and reported story of faith, African American institutions, the legacy of slavery and what remains after devastating losses.
Publisher
Crown
Tags: 2026
Categories: General Nonfiction

Haley Cohen Gilliland

Publication
A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children
Citation
A beautifully written and well-reported book on Argentina’s Dirty War, told through the eyes of the mothers and grandmothers who sought the truth about what happened to their “disappeared” loved ones and raised awareness of political repression in South America.
Publisher
Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster
Tags: 2026
Categories: General Nonfiction

Brian Goldstone

Citation
A feat of reportage, analysis and storytelling focusing on the issues that have created a national crisis of family homelessness among the so-called working poor.
Tags: 2026
Categories: General Nonfiction
Publisher
Crown
Publication
There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

Patricia Smith

Publication
The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems
Citation
A bold re-imagining of the “new and selected” form where the poet enters into dialogue with her earlier poems, transforming a career retrospective into an engagement with earlier selves.
Publisher
Scribner
Tags: 2026
Categories: Poetry

Douglas Kearney

Publication
I Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always
Citation
A multiverse of poems that burst off the page in vivid innovative structures, deploying collage, comix, music, typography, wordplay and fiction to push literary boundaries.
Publisher
Wave Books
Tags: 2026
Categories: Poetry

Juliana Spahr

Citation
A collection in which the poet takes stock of her personal disillusionment, which she uses to interrogate her relationship to her art form, community and politics.
Tags: 2026
Categories: Poetry
Publisher
Wesleyan University Press
Publication
Ars Poeticas

Hala Alyan

Publication
I'll Tell You When I'm Home: A Memoir
Citation
A memoir that reimagines diaspora and the long consequences of war with literary clarity, in which the author’s experiences with infertility and then motherhood are juxtaposed with an intergenerational family history.
Publisher
Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster
Tags: 2026
Categories: Memoir or Autobiography

Sarah Chihaya

Publication
Bibliophobia: A Memoir
Citation
An incisive account that illustrates how literary devotion can sustain but also endanger the self, since literature contains ideas that are perilous and revolutionary as well as restorative.
Publisher
Random House
Tags: 2026
Categories: Memoir or Autobiography

Anelise Chen

Publication
Clam Down: A Metamorphosis
Citation
An experimental and deeply original memoir in which the writer reimagines herself as a clam, using humor and tenderness to explore a fraught relationship with her father and the pressures of being a first-generation daughter of immigrant parents.
Publisher
One World
Tags: 2026
Categories: Memoir or Autobiography

Yiyun Li

Citation
A writer’s deeply moving and revelatory account of losing her younger son to suicide a little more than six years after her older son died in the same manner, an austere and defiant memoir of acceptance that focuses on facts, language and the persistence of life.
Tags: 2026
Categories: Memoir or Autobiography
Publisher
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication
Things in Nature Merely Grow
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