NOTES FROM A FORMER PULITZER BOARD MEMBER
The Pulitzers were announced this week and as always I’m excited for the winners, and for all of us who have supported these journalists, artists, and writers — and their projects — or are discovering them for the first time. Especially gratified that my hero Percival Everett and my friend Moises Saman won. Moises Saman is the rare kind of courageous truthseeker that our democracies depend on.
But, more personally, the Pulitzer Prize announcements always bring me back to my own Pulitzer years.
I am a former Pulitzer Board member, served for nine years starting in 2010 — the standard term, no one serves more.
What did that service entail? To speak broadly (when one is bound by confidentiality, one can only really speak broadly): a couple times a year I had to travel to NYC to handle Board business (on my own dime, mind you, typical WASP shit), but most importantly of all I had to judge all the finalists in all the categories. The Pulitzer folks who brought me on warned me that the work was “considerable” — but it’s one thing to hear about a grip of work, it’s quite another to actually do it.