Northwestern professor and poet Natasha Trethewey has been elected to the Pulitzer Prize Board, Columbia University announced.

Trethewey and journalists John Archibald of Alabama's AL.com and Gina Chua of the global news site Semafor, are all new to the Pulitzer Prize Board. All three are widely honored leaders in their fields, with decades of experience in journalism and arts and letters.

"We are fortunate to add this wealth of talent to the Pulitzer Board," said co-chairs Elizabeth Alexander, president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Emily Ramshaw, co-founder and chief executive officer of "The 19th" digital news site and a 2003 graduate of Medill.

"John and Gina bring a remarkable depth of experience in traditional and new journalism organizations in an evolving media landscape. And Natasha is one of the most decorated and recognized American poets of our generation," they said in an announcement Monday.

The 19-member Pulitzer Prize Board is composed mainly of leading journalists or news executives from media outlets across the U.S., as well as five academics or persons in the arts. They select recipients for the esteemed Pulitzer Prize, which was first awarded in 1917.

Trethewey served two terms as the 19th poet laureate of the United States (2012-2014). She is the author of five collections of poetry, including Native Guard (2006) - for which she was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize - and, most recently, "Monument: Poems New and Selected" (2018); a book of nonfiction, "Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast" (2010); a memoir, "Memorial Drive"(2020), an instant New York Times Bestseller; and "The House of Being"(2024), a meditation on writing.

She is the recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Philosophical Society. In 2017 she received the Heinz Award for Arts and Humanities.

A chancellor of the Academy of American Poets since 2019, Trethewey was awarded the 2020 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt Prize in Poetry for Lifetime Achievement from the Library of Congress. In 2022 she was the William B. Hart Poet in Residence at the American Academy in Rome. Currently, she is Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University.

"I am honored to join the esteemed members of the Pulitzer Board," Trethewey said. "I look forward to participating in the great tradition of celebrating American excellence in journalism, the arts, and letters - some of our most enduring cultural productions, the many ways we articulate the stories that matter, that give meaning and shape to our lives."

The Pulitzer Prizes, which are administered at Columbia University, were established by Joseph Pulitzer, a Hungarian-American journalist and newspaper publisher, who left money to Columbia University upon his death in 1911. A portion of his bequest was used to found the School of Journalism in 1912 and establish the Pulitzer Prizes, which were first awarded in 1917.

The dean of Columbia's journalism school and the administrator of the prizes are non-voting members. The chair rotates to the most senior member or members. The board is self-perpetuating in the election of members. Voting members may serve three terms of three years for a total of nine years.

Editor's Picks

Related Stories