In his will, Joseph Pulitzer bestowed an endowment on Columbia University of $2,000,000 for the establishment of a School of Journalism, one-fourth of which was to be “applied to prizes or scholarships for the encouragement of public service, public morals, American literature, and the advancement of education.” The Pulitzer Prizes were first awarded in 1917. In addition to journalism, the Pulitzer Prize board also gives out awards in literature, drama, poetry, music, and photography.
This year, three Black professors received Pulitzer Prizes.
Percival Everett, distinguished professor of English at the University of Southern California, won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for his novel, James (Doubleday, 2024).
James is a re-imaging of the Adventures of Huckberry Finn told through the enslaved Jim’s point of view. The novel, a #1 New York Times bestseller, also won the National Book Award. It is currently in development as a feature film to be produced by Steven Spielberg.
Professor Everett has taught creative writing at USC’s Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences since 1998. He is the author of more than 30 works of fiction, including Telephone (Graywolf Press, 2020), which was Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2021. His novel, Erasure (Graywolf Press, 2001), was the inspiration for the film American Fiction, which won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2023.
Professor Everett received his bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Miami and his master’s degree in creative writing from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, professor in the practice of theater and performance studies at Yale University, won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Drama for his play, Purpose.
The award-winning play explores the complex dynamics and legacy of an upper middle class African American family in Chicago whose patriarch was a key figure in the civil rights movement. It premiered in 2024 at the Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago and opened its Broadway production earlier this year. Purpose was nominated for six Tony Awards, including best play.
A Yale faculty member for the past four years, Professor Jacobs-Jenkins has taught at New York University, The Juilliard School, Hunter College, and the University of Texas at Austin. Last year, he received his first Tony Award for Appropriate, another family-based drama set within the walls of a former plantation house in Arkansas. Two of his other plays, Everybody and Gloria, were both Pulitzer Prize finalists.
Professor Jacobs-Jenkins received his bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Princeton University and his master’s degree in performance studies from New York University.
Edda L. Fields-Black, professor of history and director of the Dietrich College of Humanities Center at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in History for her book, COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War.
COMBEE tells the story of the Combahee River Raid, an attack on the major rice plantations in South Carolina. On June 2, 1863, Tubman and her crew led a group of Black and White soldiers up coastal South Carolina’s Combahee River in three gunboats. In a matter of hours, they torched eight rice plantations and liberated 730 people. Dr. Fields-Black is a descendant of one of the raid’s participants.
Throughout her career, Dr. Fields-Black has conducted extensive interdisciplinary research on the trans-national history of West African rice farmers, peasant farmers in the pre-colonial Upper Guinea Coast, and enslaved laborers on rice plantations in antebellum South Carolina and the Georgia lowcountry. In addition to her latest award-winning book, she has authored numerous other scholarly publications, including Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora (Indiana University Press, 2008). She is also the executive producer and librettist of “Unburied, Unmourned, Unmarked: Requiem for Rice,” a contemporary classical and multimedia symphonic work and the first symphonic work about slavery on rice plantations.
A Carnegie Mellon faculty member since 2001, Dr. Fields-Black received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.
