Pulitzers honor poet, professor from Mass.
Yesterday's Pulitzer winners included two Massachusetts residents: Amherst College professor William Taubman, for his biography of Nikita Khrushchev, and Waltham poet Franz Wright, for a collection titled "Walking to Martha's Vineyard."
"I'm startled, happily astounded," Wright, 51, said in a telephone interview from Fayetteville, Ark., where he is teaching at the University of Arkansas. "I just wish my dad could be around to hear about this. We would have had a time celebrating this."
Wright's late father, James Wright, won the Pulitzer for poetry in 1972 for his "Collected Poems." This is the first time a father and son have won in that category.
Taubman, 63, the Bertrand Snell professor of political science at Amherst, is also the son of a writer. His father, Howard Taubman, was a longtime music and drama critic for The New York Times.
"I always felt myself to be a hybrid," Taubman said in a telephone interview. "I grew up in a family where the story was the thing and how to tell it well. But then I became a professor, and the game changed: You have to go deeper and as broadly as you can. I always hoped to do something to combine the best of both worlds. I wrote a book of Soviet history and about [Soviet leader Nikita] Khruschev's life and managed to do it in a way that appealed to the general reader. That makes the prize all the sweeter."
"Khrushchev: The Man and His Era" (Norton), which also won the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award, was more than 20 years in the making, Taubman said, and was originally meant to be a sequel to his 1982 book, "Stalin's American Policy." He had previously written "Governing Soviet Cities," "The View from Lenin Hills," and -- with his wife, Jane Taubman, professor of Russian at Amherst -- "Moscow Spring."
Wright, who was born in Vienna, grew up in the Pacific Northwest, the Midwest, and northern California. He came to Boston to teach at Emerson College in the 1980s. He has won fellowships from the Guggenheim and Whiting foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts. "Odd though this sounds, I survived in the `90s on writing awards," Wright said.
The `90s was a hard decade for Wright. A two-year period of psychotic depression left him unable to write. Many of his poems dwell on extreme states of experience: emotional and psychological duress and addiction.
Wright described "Walking to Martha's Vineyard" (Knopf) as "a happier book, and it's also an overtly religious book." He converted to Roman Catholicism three years ago. "It's made my life possible," Wright said of his religious faith.
Wright, who works as a volunteer facilitator at the Center for Grieving Children, in Arlington, was a Pulitzer finalist in 2002 for his previous book, "The Beforelife." His other poetry collections include "Tapping the White Cane of Solitude," "The Earth Without You," "The Night World & the Word Night," "Rorschach Test," "Ill Lit: Selected & New Poems," and "Knell." Wright has also published translations of poetry by Erica Pedretti, Rene Char, and Rainer Maria Rilke.
Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com. David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com. 