2 UC faculty and 11 alumni awarded 2024 Pulitzer Prizes

Two UC faculty members and 11 alumni have been honored with 2024 Pulitzer Prizes, awarded May 6 by Columbia University. The Pulitzer Prize is one of the most prestigious honors in journalism, literature and music composition.

Brandon Som, UC San Diego associate professor of literature and creative writing, received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for his second full-length collection, “Tripas.” The work draws together the languages and stories of his multicultural, multigenerational home, from his Chicana grandmother who worked on a Motorola assembly line to his Chinese American father and grandparents who ran a family corner store. Read an excerpt of “Tripas” and learn more about UC’s rich poetic tradition here.

Tripas by Brandon Som Wins the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry https://t.co/KVqTLQYJUG #BrandonSom #PulitzerPrize #Tripas #Poetry pic.twitter.com/Uhk9PIZaQS

— UGA Press (@UGAPress) May 8, 2024

Founded by UC Santa Cruz alum Ken Doctor in November 2020, Lookout Santa Cruz received the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news reporting “for its detailed and nimble community-focused coverage, over a holiday weekend, of catastrophic flooding and mudslides that displaced thousands of residents and destroyed more than 1,000 homes and businesses.”

The award was given to the whole staff, who worked tirelessly as nine atmospheric rivers hit Santa Cruz County at once between late December 2022 and mid-January 2023, reporting developments and distributing news by text message where internet and power failed.

Ties to the Santa Cruz campus run deep throughout the young news organization, which was founded with the mission of not only delivering news but improving lives in Santa Cruz County. Ashley Harmon, senior director of audience and partnerships, and Jamie Garfield, director of student and community engagement, are UC Santa Cruz alums, as is Lily Belli, a food writer whose text transmissions to the community during normal times about local dining became a model for reaching out to the community during a crisis. Doctor is deeply involved in the campus, having served as both past president of the UC Santa Cruz Foundation and the UCSC Alumni Council and continuing as a Foundation trustee. UC Berkeley is represented, too — education reporter Hillary Ojeda is a Cal Bear.

Jody K. Biehl, opinion and community voices editor, is a humanities professor at UC Santa Cruz, where her courses focus on news literacy, the First Amendment and nonfiction writing. She also teaches in the campus’s prestigious Science Communication graduate program, which has served as a pipeline for Lookout newsroom internships. Lookout Santa Cruz memberships are free to UC Santa Cruz students and high school students in the area, in an effort to improve news literacy and boost the next generation of local news readers and writers.

“The Pulitzer jury talked about community-focused coverage, and that’s what we do as a local news organization,” Doctor said. “Not just in coverage, but in making sure our news gets to our audience. During the flooding, people in our remotest areas in the county had no electricity, no radio connection. They were getting pure, basic information from our updates. For us as a newsroom to jump in and cover the flooding in a way that really mattered to people was exciting.”

“This model Ken [Doctor] has created is based on a deeper understanding of the community,” Biehl adds. “Maybe that’s the big hope we have for a local news revival — that we have people reporting on issues we know about and are truly invested in.”

“We’re still wrapping our heads around the fact that we won,” Doctor says. “People here have been saying not just congratulations, but that they’re proud of what we did for Santa Cruz. It just really reinforces that we’ve got this model right.”

Nathan Thrall, a UC Santa Barbara creative writing alum, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for his book, “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy.” This true story follows the journey of a Palestinian father whose five-year-old son dies in a fiery school bus crash when Israeli and Palestinian rescue teams are delayed by security regulations. The Pulitzer committee hailed the work as “an indelibly human portrait of the struggle over Israel/Palestine and a new understanding of the tragic history and reality of one of the most contested places on earth.”

Faculty and staff from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism were also among those honored with 2024 Pulitzer Prizes. Alum Brett Murphy (’16), a reporter on ProPublica’s national desk, won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for public service for investigative reporting on the Supreme Court and outsider influence which pushed the Court to adopt its first code of conduct. To perform Bay Area-based research for the project, Murphy recruited students in the Investigative Reporting Program, Kathleen Quinn (’24) and Marissa Muller (’24), to his team. Alum Tracy Weber (’89) was an editor on the series. ProPublica will also be presented with the iconic Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal, awarded each year to the American news organization that wins in the public service category.

“This is a tremendous honor and I’m so happy I was able to be a part of the team,” Murphy said. “I’ve long admired ProPublica’s Pulitzer-winning projects, so it’s a career highlight to have played a small part in this one. I hope the recognition brings even more attention to the issues we uncovered last year.”

UC Berkeley Journalism school alum Sarah Cahlan (’19) was part of The Washington Post team that won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting on a series of stories about the AR-15, the rifle most commonly used in the nation’s deadliest mass shootings. Cahlan is a video reporter and one of the founding members of the Visual Forensics team at The Washington Post. She shared in a 2022 Pulitzer Prize for public service for her reporting on the January 6, 2021 insurrection.

Lecturer John Harden, who taught data journalism at the journalism school this semester, also contributed to The Washington Post’s AR-15 stories and shares in the Pulitzer honor.

The Pulitzer Prizes are announced each year by Columbia University and awarded on the recommendation of the Pulitzer Prize Board. More than 2,500 entries are submitted each year in the Pulitzer Prize competitions, and only 23 awards are normally made. Winners receive a $15,000 cash award and a certificate; the winner in the Public Service category of the Journalism competition is awarded a gold medal. Numerous UC alumni and 40 UC faculty have won the prizes since their inception in 1917.

For more information on the honor, please visit the Pulitzer Prize website.