Pulitzer Prize Winning Books by Black Writers (includes Finalists)
Since 1917 the Pulitzer Prize has honored excellence in journalism and the arts. The first award was presented in 1918. The Prize recognizes American authors in six “Letters and Drama” categories; Biography/Autobiography, Fiction, General Non-Fiction, History, Poetry, and Drama (technically not a book award, but plays are all available as books and have been included here).
The first African-American writer to win a Pulitzer Prize in any of the above categories was Gwendolyn Brooks who received the award for poetry for her collection Annie Allen in 1950.
4 Books were Finalists or Winners of Pulitzer Prizes in 2023
Winner - General Nonfiction
His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice
by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa
Publication Date: May 17, 2022
List Price: $30.00
Format: Hardcover, 432 pages
Classification: Nonfiction
ISBN13: 9780593490617
Imprint: Viking
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Parent Company: Bertelsmann
Read Our Review of His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice
Read a Description of His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice
“Since we know George Floyd’s death with tragic clarity, we must know Floyd’s America—and life—with tragic clarity. Essential for our times.” —Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist
“A much-needed portrait of the life, times, and martyrdom of George Floyd, a chronicle of the racial awakening sparked by his brutal and untimely death, and an essential work of history I hope everyone will read.” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author of The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song
A landmark biography by two prizewinning Washington Post reporters that reveals how systemic racism shaped George Floyd’s life and legacy—from his family’s roots in the tobacco fields of North Carolina, to ongoing inequality in housing, education, health care, criminal justice, and policing—telling the story of how one man’s tragic experience brought about a global movement for change.
The events of that day are now tragically familiar: on May 25, 2020, George Floyd became the latest Black person to die at the hands of the police, murdered outside of a Minneapolis convenience store by white officer Derek Chauvin. The video recording of his death set off the largest protest movement in the history of the United States, awakening millions to the pervasiveness of racial injustice. But long before his face was painted onto countless murals and his name became synonymous with civil rights, Floyd was a father, partner, athlete, and friend who constantly strove for a better life.
His Name Is George Floyd tells the story of a beloved figure from Houston’s housing projects as he faced the stifling systemic pressures that come with being a Black man in America. Placing his narrative within the context of the country’s enduring legacy of institutional racism, this deeply reported account examines Floyd’s family roots in slavery and sharecropping, the segregation of his schools, the overpolicing of his community amid a wave of mass incarceration, and the callous disregard toward his struggle with addiction—putting today’s inequality into uniquely human terms. Drawing upon hundreds of interviews with Floyd’s closest friends and family, his elementary school teachers and varsity coaches, civil rights icons, and those in the highest seats of political power, Washington Post reporters Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa offer a poignant and moving exploration of George Floyd’s America, revealing how a man who simply wanted to breathe ended up touching the world.
Winner - Poetry
My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing
by Carl Phillips
Publication Date: Aug 08, 2023
List Price: $15.00
Format: Paperback, 112 pages
Classification: Nonfiction
ISBN13: 9780300274141
Imprint: Yale University Press
Publisher: Yale University Press
Parent Company: Yale University
Read a Description of My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing
An invaluable companion for any writer seeking to make the writing life a more complex and cooperative venture
"Illuminating, deeply endearing essays."—Ron Charles, Washington Post
"A lovely, loving letter to aspiring writers."—Diego Báez, Booklist
In these intimate and eloquent meditations, the award-winning poet Carl Phillips shares lessons he has learned about the writing life, an "apprenticeship to what can never fully be mastered." Drawing on forty years of teaching and mentoring emerging writers, he weaves his experiences as a poet with the necessary survival skills, including ambition, stamina, silence, politics, practice, audience, and community.
In the tradition of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, and Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, this is an invaluable companion for writers at every stage of their journey. Phillips’s book serves as a partner in speculation and an invitation to embrace mystery.
Finalist - Biography
His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice
by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa
Publication Date: May 17, 2022
List Price: $30.00
Format: Hardcover, 432 pages
Classification: Nonfiction
ISBN13: 9780593490617
Imprint: Viking
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Parent Company: Bertelsmann
Read Our Review of His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice
Read a Description of His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice
“Since we know George Floyd’s death with tragic clarity, we must know Floyd’s America—and life—with tragic clarity. Essential for our times.” —Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist
“A much-needed portrait of the life, times, and martyrdom of George Floyd, a chronicle of the racial awakening sparked by his brutal and untimely death, and an essential work of history I hope everyone will read.” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author of The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song
A landmark biography by two prizewinning Washington Post reporters that reveals how systemic racism shaped George Floyd’s life and legacy—from his family’s roots in the tobacco fields of North Carolina, to ongoing inequality in housing, education, health care, criminal justice, and policing—telling the story of how one man’s tragic experience brought about a global movement for change.
The events of that day are now tragically familiar: on May 25, 2020, George Floyd became the latest Black person to die at the hands of the police, murdered outside of a Minneapolis convenience store by white officer Derek Chauvin. The video recording of his death set off the largest protest movement in the history of the United States, awakening millions to the pervasiveness of racial injustice. But long before his face was painted onto countless murals and his name became synonymous with civil rights, Floyd was a father, partner, athlete, and friend who constantly strove for a better life.
His Name Is George Floyd tells the story of a beloved figure from Houston’s housing projects as he faced the stifling systemic pressures that come with being a Black man in America. Placing his narrative within the context of the country’s enduring legacy of institutional racism, this deeply reported account examines Floyd’s family roots in slavery and sharecropping, the segregation of his schools, the overpolicing of his community amid a wave of mass incarceration, and the callous disregard toward his struggle with addiction—putting today’s inequality into uniquely human terms. Drawing upon hundreds of interviews with Floyd’s closest friends and family, his elementary school teachers and varsity coaches, civil rights icons, and those in the highest seats of political power, Washington Post reporters Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa offer a poignant and moving exploration of George Floyd’s America, revealing how a man who simply wanted to breathe ended up touching the world.
Finalist - General Nonfiction
Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation
by Linda Villarosa
Publication Date: Jun 14, 2022
List Price: $30.00
Format: Hardcover, 288 pages
Classification: Nonfiction
ISBN13: 9780385544887
Imprint: Doubleday
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Parent Company: Bertelsmann
Read Our Review of Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation
Read a Description of Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation
From an award-winning writer at the New York Times Magazine and a contributor to the 1619 Project comes a landmark book that tells the full story of racial health disparities in America, revealing the toll racism takes on individuals and the health of our nation.
In 2018, Linda Villarosa’s New York Times Magazine article on maternal and infant mortality among black mothers and babies in America caused an awakening. Hundreds of studies had previously established a link between racial discrimination and the health of Black Americans, with little progress toward solutions. But Villarosa’s article exposing that a Black woman with a college education is as likely to die or nearly die in childbirth as a white woman with an eighth-grade education made racial disparities in health care impossible to ignore. Now, in Under the Skin, Linda Villarosa lays bare the forces in the American health-care system and in American society that cause Black people to “live sicker and die quicker” compared to their white counterparts.
Today’s medical texts and instruments still carry fallacious slavery-era assumptions that Black bodies are fundamentally different from white bodies. Study after study of medical settings show worse treatment and outcomes for Black patients. Black people live in dirtier, more polluted communities due to environmental racism and neglect from all levels of government. And, most powerfully, Villarosa describes the new understanding that coping with the daily scourge of racism ages Black people prematurely. Anchored by unforgettable human stories and offering incontrovertible proof, Under the Skin is dramatic, tragic, and necessary reading.