The New Yorker Wins Two 2024 Pulitzer Prizes

Two works printed by The New Yorker acquired Pulitzer Prizes on Monday, inserting them among the many yr’s high achievements in journalism, letters, music, and drama.

Sarah Stillman, a employees author, gained within the explanatory-reporting class for her illuminating investigation of felony homicide, a draconian authorized doctrine that has despatched 1000’s of People—disproportionately younger and Black—to jail, typically for all times, for killings they didn’t commit. “It’s really one of many cruellest concepts within the American authorized system,” one particular person instructed Stillman. “And most of the people don’t even comprehend it exists.”

In its quotation, the Pulitzer committee praised Stillman’s “searing indictment” of “the felony-murder cost and its disparate penalties, typically devastating, for communities of colour.”

The New Yorker’s different winner, Medar de la Cruz, acquired the Pulitzer within the illustrated-reporting-and-commentary class for “The Diary of a Rikers Island Library Employee,” which takes readers inside New York Metropolis’s largest jail advanced. De la Cruz’s evocative drawings depict his deliveries of books to inmates, providing the general public a uncommon glimpse inside Rikers, the place cameras and telephones are banned and inmates are topic to circumstances which were harshly criticized by authorized and human-rights organizations. “I’m at all times moved by the sense of gratitude and heat that some individuals categorical after we’re capable of get them the books that they requested for,” de la Cruz writes.

In honoring de la Cruz, the Pulitzer board cited his “daring black-and-white photos that humanize the prisoners and employees by way of their starvation for books.”

Stillman has written for The New Yorker since 2011, on matters together with human trafficking, the drug commerce, and labor circumstances at factories abroad. Her work has acquired two Nationwide Journal Awards, two George Polk Awards, and a Hillman Prize for Journal Journalism. Stillman, a 2016 MacArthur Fellow, teaches investigative reporting at Yale and created the International Migration Venture at Columbia College’s Graduate Faculty of Journalism.

De la Cruz, a graduate of the ArtCenter Faculty of Design, teaches visible communications at group workshops in New York Metropolis and is engaged on a graphic novel about his experiences on Rikers Island. His Pulitzer-winning New Yorker contribution was his first submission to the publication.

Along with Stillman and de la Cruz, 4 New Yorker contributors had been acknowledged by the Pulitzer committee. The employees author Jay Caspian Kang was named a finalist within the commentary class for columns concerning the gulf between real-world injustices and the way they’re publicly mentioned, together with essays concerning the failed promise of affirmative motion for Asian People and the racial politics of the N.B.A.

The employees author Vinson Cunningham was named a finalist within the criticism class for theatre evaluations that mixed astute stage evaluation with poignant reflections on life and dying, artwork and politics, and id and race. In recognizing Cunningham, the Pulitzer committee thought of evaluations of an unconventional Central Park manufacturing of “Hamlet” and a Broadway comedy about West African immigrants in a Harlem hair salon.

Angie Wang, a finalist within the illustrated-reporting class, was honored for an imaginative Sketchbook that contrasted the language-development abilities of ChatGPT with these of her younger son.

Justin Chang, who joined the publication’s employees in February, gained within the criticism class for his writing about movie on the Los Angeles Instances.

With its 2024 awards, The New Yorker has gained eight Pulitzer Prizes, together with the gold medal for public service. Magazines turned eligible for Pulitzer consideration beginning in 2014. ♦