WriteOn! 2017 Black Pulitzer Prize winners.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
When I saw this tweet
I decided to share it here at Black Kos, and to fill out the details on the recipients and their work. Dopper has also covered this in the news below. Black media outlets had immediate coverage.
From Ebony Magazine
This Year’s List of Pulitzer Prize Winners Is Full of Melanin
Colson Whitehead took home the venerable fiction prize for his critically-acclaimed novel The Underground Railroad, which reimagines the historic route as an actual railroad. The book has been optioned for film and will be brought to the screen by Moonlight director Barry Jenkins.
Playwright Lynn Nottage won her second Pulitzer Prize for drama, this time for Sweat, a project that has been hailed as the “first theatrical landmark of the Trump era” by the New York Times. Poet and professor Tyehimba Jess took home the poetry prize for his seminal collection, Olio, which “presents the sweat and story behind America’s blues, worksongs and church hymns.” Lastly, Hilton Als of the New York Times was honored in the journalism category for distinguished criticism.
The award has been given out 101 times. Past Black winners include, Gwendolyn Brooks, the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize for Literature, journalist Eugene Robinson, Playwrights August Wilson and Suzan-Lori Parks, poet Natasha Trethewey, and historians Manning Marable and Isabel Wilkerson, among others.
Essence had:
Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad continued its critical and bestselling dominance with its fiction prize win. Published last August, the book won the 2016 National Book Award in November, was picked by Oprah Winfrey to be part of her book club, and was optioned to become a TV show written and directed by Oscar Winning director Barry Jenkins.
The Pulitzer called the book “a smart melding of realism and allegory that combines the violence of slavery and the drama of escape in a myth that speaks to contemporary America.” It is a great win for Whitehead who spent 16 years working on the book.
Sweat is the second Pulitzer drama win for Nottage, who won her first one in 2009 for her drama Ruined. Sweat is a thoughtful examination of the working-class anger that led to the election of President Trump. “No. 1, I’m representing for women, and No. 2, I’m representing for playwrights of color,” the playwright told The Los Angeles Times. About her win.
As for his poetry win for Olio, Detroit native Jess was recognized by the Pulitzer committee for exploring "collective memory and challenge contemporary notions of race and identity.”
The only journalism winner of the four, Hilton Als has been writing at the New Yorker for 13 years and this is his first Pulitzer for criticism. As the theater critic for the publication, he spent 2016 expertly reviewing such theatrical works as The Color Purple and Nottage’s Sweat
The Underground Railroad, by Colin Whitehead — got a real boost from Oprah — and her book club.
Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood—where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned—Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.
In Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor—engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar’s first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city’s placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom.
Like the protagonist of Gulliver’s Travels, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey—hers is an odyssey through time as well as space. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre–Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman’s ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.
Lynn Nottage’s Sweat — on Broadway, moved there from The Public Theater and premiered at The Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
An American Dream Shattered
A group of close friends shares everything: drinks, secrets and laughs. But when rumors of layoffs shake up the factory where they work, the fragile bonds of their community begin to splinter and a horrific crime sends shock waves across two generations. This powerful world premiere by acclaimed playwright Lynn Nottage (Ruined, Intimate Apparel) explores America’s industrial decline at the turn of the millennium with a look inside a Pennsylvania town whose people struggle to reclaim what’s lost, find redemption and redefine themselves in a new century. Co-commissioned with Arena Stage through OSF’s American Revolutions program.
Bio
Playwright Lynn Nottage was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1964. At age eight, she had already written her first play. Her inspiration came from the women in her family. Her grandmother, mother, and other women were the nurses, teachers, activists and artists in the Brooklyn neighborhood where she grew up. Nottage is a graduate of New York’s High School of Music and Art in Harlem where she earned her high school diploma in 1982. That same year, she enrolled at Brown University where she received her B.A. degree in 1986. She continued her studies and received her M.F.A. degree in playwriting at Yale School of Drama in 1989.
Nottage became a full-time playwright in the 1990s after spending four years at Amnesty International as national press officer. Her first break came as a commissioned monologue for a musical entitled, A...My Name is Still Alice. In 1993, her short play, Poof!, about a woman whose husband spontaneously combusts premiered at the Actors Theater in Louisville, Kentucky, where it won the Heideman Award. In 1996, the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago, Illinois, produced one of her most known plays, Crumbs from the Table of Joy, in its family outreach series.
Nottage took a break from writing for nearly seven years, but in 2003, her drama Intimate Apparel, a play about an African American seamstress in turn of the century New York, won major awards including the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Francesca Primus Prize and the Steinberg Award. In 2004, actress Viola Davis won a Drama Desk Award for her outstanding performance in Intimate Apparel at the Roundabout Theatre Company in New York City.
Tyehimba Jess is attracting a lot of notice in poetry circles.
Born in Detroit, poet Tyehimba Jess earned his BA from the University of Chicago and his MFA from New York University. He is the author of leadbelly (2005) and Olio (2016), winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
Jess is the rare poet who bridges slam and academic poetry. His first collection, leadbelly (2005), an exploration of the blues musician Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter’s life, was chosen for the National Poetry Series by Brigit Pegeen Kelly, and was voted one of the top three poetry books of the year by Black Issues Book Review. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly noted that “the collection’s strength lies in its contradictory forms; from biography to lyric to hard-driving prose poem, boast to song, all are soaked in the rhythm and dialect of Southern blues and the demands of honoring one’s talent." Jess's second book Olio (2016) received the Pulitzer Prize.
A two-time member of the Chicago Green Mill Slam team, Jess was also Chicago’s Poetry Ambassador to Accra, Ghana. His work has been featured in numerous anthologies, including Soulfires: Young Black Men in Love and Violence (1996), Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry (2000), and Dark Matter 2: Reading the Bones (2004). He is the author of African American Pride: Celebrating Our Achievements, Contributions, and Enduring Legacy (2003).
Olio received superb reviews when it was released.
This 21st century hymnal of black evolutionary poetry, this almanac, this theatrical melange of miraculous meta-memory. Tyehimba Jess is inventive, prophetic, wondrous. He writes unflinchingly into the historical clefs of blackface, black sound, human sensibility. After the last poem is read we have no idea how long we’ve been on our knees.
— Nikky Finney, Head Off & Split
Olio is one of the most inventive, intensive poetic undertakings of the past decade…Through photos, drawings, interviews, foldouts, tables, facts, fictions, and yes, so many strong poems … Olio assembles and raises the voices of an essential chorus: “Listen to how we sing while we/ promises unto ourselves not to die.”
—Boston Globe
The content of this book really is a remarkable one...Tyehimba Jess gathers the histories of the lives—untold lives of many of the African-American artists who sort of built the blues and jazz and the sound that...we consider quintessentially American. And he's written these poems as history in a variety of voices, in a chorus.
—All Things Considered
Once I closed these pages I came to the conclusion that Tyehimba is our Langston—not necessarily in terms of style or lyrical sensibility, but in terms of proficiency and historical impact. It is the rigor with which this book archives history, offers new narratives and context for the “characters” it contains that leads me to the conclusion that readers a century from now will count this among the treasures that are emblematic of this era.
—African Voices
In case you’ve never seen/heard him — here he is in Nashville.
Hilton Als is a critic. He may not be a household name in the black community, however he is of and from the working class black community in NYC with roots from Barbados. Artist Coco Fusco talks about her friendship with him.
I will never forget the first time I had one of those “moments” with Hilton Als. It was years ago, and we were younger of course, and I was bringing in some measly article to the Village Voice and there was Hilton, laying out pictures and watching everything. I noticed that he was as amused by the editor who was ordering both of us around as I was. Our eyes met and we shared a moment of silent laughter. It was instant sibling-style symbiosis. We were both upstart kids in downtown New York who had been reared by uppity Caribbean matriarchs. It wasn’t long before I was calling Hilton at three in the morning to rant about men, and he’d call me at equally odd hours to ask for recipes and home remedies. Every time he’d publish one of those acerbic profiles in the Voice, Vibe, or The New Yorker I’d breathe a sigh of relief that I wasn’t the victim, and tell Hilton that he was destined to become the James Baldwin of the 21st century.
As a black, gay, man — he crosses lines and borders of identity.
His New Yorker bio:
Hilton Als became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 1994 and a theatre critic in 2002. He began contributing to the magazine in 1989, writing pieces for The Talk of the Town. Before coming to The New Yorker, Als was a staff writer for the Village Voice and an editor-at-large at Vibe. Als edited the catalogue for the 1994-95 Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition “Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art.” His first book, “The Women,” was published in 1996. His most recent book, “White Girls,” a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2014, discusses various narratives of race and gender. In 2016, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism.
In 1997, the New York Association of Black Journalists awarded Als first prize in both Magazine Critique/Review and Magazine Arts and Entertainment. He was awarded a Guggenheim for creative writing in 2000 and the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for 2002-03. In 2009, Als worked with the performer Justin Bond on “Cold Water,” an exhibition of paintings, drawings, and videos by performers, at La MaMa Gallery. In 2010, he co-curated “Self-Consciousness,” at the VeneKlasen/Werner gallery, in Berlin, and published “Justin Bond/Jackie Curtis.” In 2015, he collaborated with the artist Celia Paul to create “Desdemona for Celia by Hilton,” an exhibition for the Metropolitan Opera’s Gallery Met.
Als is an associate professor of writing at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and has taught at Yale University, Wesleyan, and Smith College. He lives in New York City.
In
the New Yorker piece covering his win
Here are the ten pieces by Als, from 2016, that were part of the prize-winning submission to the Pulitzer committee:
“Dreamgirls”:John Doyle’s fresh and vital revival of “The Color Purple.”
“Bookworms”:A stage adaptation of “2666.”
“The Night Crawlers”: Down and out in Eugene O’Neill’s “Hughie.”
“Betrothed”:A marriage of cultures in “Familiar.”
“My Old Sweetheart”: Revisiting the traumas of the past in “Blackbird.”
“Legends”:Recriminations and regrets in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”
“Conversation Piece”: Two shows raise questions about the value of speech in storytelling.
“Showoffs”:Life, death, and telling all, in “Duat,” “A Life,” “The Front Page,” and“Falsettos.”
“Worked”:In “Sweat,” Lynn Nottage and Suzan-Lori Parks make the recognizable unrecognizable—which is to say, they make it art.
“Bullies”:The musical “Dear Evan Hansen,” directed by Michael Greif, is a profound evocation of how the need to belong can be as ugly as the need to exclude.
Als is most recently the author of “White Girls.”
This is a fascinating interview with him from 2013.
This week on the podcast, Reihan Salam welcomes Hilton Als, the theater writer for the New Yorker and one of America's most daring and inventive critics. In his latest book, White Girls, Als blends criticism and memoir in a series of interlinked reflections on race, sex, and art, and he discusses the book with Reihan along with his early years as a writer and what it means to cross boundaries of class, color, and culture
Here’s hoping that the award of a Pulitzer will bring these writers and their work to a wider audience.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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On average, from 2012 through 2014, Illinois insurers paid out 20 percent less for bodily injury and property damage claims in Nash’s predominantly minority zip code than in Hedges’ largely white one, according to data collected by the state’s insurance commission. But Nash pays 51 percent more for that portion of his coverage than Hedges does.
For decades, auto insurers have been observed to charge higher average premiums to drivers living in predominantly minority urban neighborhoods than to drivers with similar safety records living in majority white neighborhoods. Insurers have long defended their pricing by saying that the risk of accidents is greater in those neighborhoods, even for motorists who have never had one.
But a first-of-its-kind analysis by ProPublica and Consumer Reports, which examined auto insurance premiums and payouts in California, Illinois, Texas and Missouri, has found that many of the disparities in auto insurance prices between minority and white neighborhoods are wider than differences in risk can explain. In some cases, insurers such as Allstate, Geico and Liberty Mutual were charging premiums that were on average 30 percent higher in zip codes where most residents are minorities than in whiter neighborhoods with similar accident costs.
Our findings document what consumer advocates have long suspected: Despite laws in almost every state banning discriminatory rate-setting, some minority neighborhoods pay higher auto insurance premiums than do white areas with similar payouts on claims. This disparity may amount to a subtler form of redlining, a term that traditionally refers to denial of services or products to minority areas. And, since minorities tend to lag behind whites in income, they may be hard-pressed to afford the higher payments.
Rachel Goodman, staff attorney in the American Civil Liberties Union’s racial justice program, said ProPublica’s findings were distressingly familiar. “These results fit within a pattern that we see all too often — racial disparities allegedly result from differences in risk, but that justification falls apart when we drill down into the data,” she said.
“We already know that zip code matters far too much in our segregated society,” Goodman said. “It is dispiriting to see that, in addition to limiting economic opportunity, living in the wrong zip code can mean that you pay more for car insurance regardless of whether you and your neighbors are safe drivers.”
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Whitehead’s novel has been heralded by everyone from Oprah Winfrey to Barack Obama since being published on Aug. 2, 2016. According to Doubleday, The Underground Railroad has sold more than 825,000 copies in the USA.
The novel tells the story of Cora and Caesar, two slaves on a Georgia plantation who escape, but find themselves caught up in a murder while navigating the Underground Railroad, where engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath Southern soil.
Other black Pulitzer winners announced Monday included: Tyehimba Jess for poetry, Hilton Als for criticism and Lynn Nottage for drama.
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Lee Daniels recently announced the premise behind his upcoming remake of the ’80s sentimental classic Terms of Endearment. In the original, Debra Winger’s character dies of cancer, but in this filmmaker’s version, which also will feature Oprah Winfrey, one of the leads will have AIDS—a disease she contracted by having sex with a man who is presumably on the down low.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, Daniels believes this storyline is “important.”
“I’ve got to tell stories that are important to me, and so many African-American women died,” he said. “I want to make Flap [played by Jeff Daniels in the 1983 film] gay and infect the Debra Winger character. And then we explore the ’80s in a different way.”
Now, as a journalist who has covered AIDS in black America for over a decade, I commend the effort to bring stories about the epidemic to the screen. Aside from HBO’s Life Support, starring Queen Latifah, black HIV-positive women are usually completely ignored or unfairly demonized (think: Tyler Perry’s Temptation). But there is a way to center these voices without throwing black gay and bisexual men under a bus.
There just has to be.
I’ll admit, I haven’t seen the script, but I have an inkling that I really don’t need to given that these down-low narratives have one goal and one goal only: To paint black queer men as the enemy of our community. And let’s be real, since the down low became a cultural phenomenon in the early 2000s, pop culture’s handling of the topic hasn’t been known for its nuance and empathy.
These bogeyman cautionary tales are just a tired extension of our own paranoia and homophobia. But here’s the gag: It’s all been debunked. Yes, there are closeted black men who sleep with men and women and black women who have been infected by positive closeted men. But study after study has shown that the down low is not fueling HIV among African-American women.
The true culprit is a combination of factors, including high rates of undiagnosed and untreated sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV; disproportionate poverty and poor health; IV drug use; stigma, sexism and homophobia; and mass incarceration in black America that takes significant numbers of black men out of the community, leaving a lot of straight brothas on the outside to share the same female partners. Oh, and straight black men get HIV—roughly 1,900 each year—and 87 percent of the 4,100 black women who are newly diagnosed contract HIV through heterosexual sex ... so I’ll let you connect the dots.
But by all means, let’s keep pointing the finger at gay and bi black men.
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Temporary Protected Status for earthquake-displaced Haitians expires July 22, and whether it will be extended is already causing anxiety and fear in the Haitian community in South Florida. Miami Herald: Haitians wonder if they will be sent home to a still-devastated Haiti
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Given President Donald Trump’s hard line on illegal immigration, Haitians are afraid that a special status that allowed some 58,000 Haitians to stay in the United States as their nation recovered from a devastating 2010 earthquake may not be renewed.
Former President Barack Obama approved Temporary Protected Status for Haitians in the wake of the earthquake. It is up for renewal on July 22, but many Haitians who took advantage of the program fear it won’t be extended, sending them back to an impoverished country where efforts to rebuild housing are lagging and 750,000 people still don’t have safe water for drinking and cooking.
“Over 6 1/2 years later, Haiti is still trying to recover. Over 6 1/2 years later, we still have people living under tents. Imagine sending 58,000 people to a country in turmoil,” said Marleine Bastien, executive director of FANM (Haitian Women of Miami), one of about a dozen community groups that came together Thursday in Little Haiti to call for the immediate extension of TPS.
“We are here to ask our partners in the Trump administration to pay attention to Haiti,” Bastien said. “People are anxious, they are concerned, they are scared to death” that they will be sent back.
The 7.0-magnitude quake, which struck on Jan. 12, 2010, killed an estimated 300,000 Haitians and left large swaths of Port-au-Prince and surrounding communities in rubble. Haiti also is still trying to recuperate from Hurricane Matthew, which tore through southern Haiti last October and left more than 900 people dead and $2.8 billion in damages.
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Voices and Soul
by
Black Kos Poetry Editor
Justice Putnam
Thomas "Blind Tom" Wiggins was born in Harris County Georgia in 1849. By 1850, he was sold, along with his parents, Charity and Domingo, to General James Neil Bethune, the first southern newspaper publisher calling for secession. Because of his blindness, Bethune originally planned on killing Tom, since he had no provable economic value. Instead, he was allowed to play around the plantation, where he showed an interest in the piano after hearing Bethune's daughters playing a expensive Bösendorfer in one of the many parlors. Recognized now as an "autistic savant," Tom showed such an interest and talent on the piano, that by the age of five, Bethune permitted him to live in a room attached to the Big House that was equipped with a piano. By the age of eight, Bethune hired out Tom to a concert promoter, who toured him extensively, playing as many as four concerts a day, while earning the Bethunes the equivalent of $2.25 million dollars a year in today's currency, marking Tom the highest "compensated" pianist of the nineteenth century. Eventually, the Bethunes made a fortune off of Blind Tom, estimated at over $17 million dollars. Blind Tom died of a stroke at the age of fifty-nine, in New Jersey, at the home of his old Master’s daughter in law, after a bitter “custody” battle.
From his 2017 Pulitzer Prize winning volume, "Olio," Poet Tyehimba Jess imagines how it was that Blind Tom acquired his talents, talents that showed the Master his provable economic value.
Did a slave song at a master’s bidding
mark Tom while asleep in Charity's womb?
The whole plantation would be called to sing
and dance in Master Epps’ large parlor room—
after work sprung from dawn and dragged past dusk,
after children auctioned to parts unknown,
after funerals and whippings. Thus
was the whim of the patriarch. No groans
allowed, just high steppin’ celebration,
grins all around, gritted or sincere.
Charity threw feet, hips, arms into motion
to please the tyrant piano. Was it here
Tom learned how music can prove the master?
While he spun in a womb of slavish laughter?
-- Tyehimba Jess
"What Marked Tom?"
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