Anne Boyer and Jericho Brown Win 2020 Pulitzer Prizes!

Wonderful news for poets on the 2020 Pulitzer Prize front: Anne Boyer has won the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction for The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)! Jericho Brown is the winner in Poetry for The Tradition (Copper Canyon); and Ben Lerner's The Topeka School (also FSG) was a finalist for the Pulitzer in Fiction.

Shoshana Olidort spoke with Boyer last year for Harriet about The Undying, and asked: "What does it mean to expropriate literature away from literature, and how do you do that differently in a book about cancer, and in a collection of poems about, among other things, being a woman in America?"

BOYER: I had to write the book for two reasons. The first one was gratitude for all that kept me alive and made life worth living, and the second was vengeance against all that diminishes life, the arrangement of a racist, misogynist, capitalist world that sickens people, profits from their illnesses, and then blames them for their own deaths. I'm probably better at writing than I am at anything else, and so it is that writing a book was some of what I could do in return for my life, or at least it is what I could do toward the most good. I am, however, not very skilled at being happy about publishing or publicity, and I've never quite understood why—life-long shyness, maybe; a standard-issue egalitarian impulse; a consistently affirmed hypothesis, too, that public success is a precinct of haters and sycophants that should be visited as little as possible in a well-lived life.

Read that interview in full here. And the complete list of Pulitzer Prize winners is here. Congrats to all!