Several 2008 Pulitzer winners have N.E. ties
Along with Boston Globe arts writer Mark Feeney, six other writers, one composer, and one photographer all with New England ties received 2008 Pulitzer Prize awards today.
Newton-born Jake Hooker, a New York Times reporter, won a Pulitzer for investigative reporting along with the Times' Walt Bogdanich for their series titled "A Toxic Pipeline." The articles looked at the products imported from China that contain toxic ingredients. Hooker had attended Milton Academy and Dartmouth College.
John Matteson, honored for his biography "Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father," is a graduate of Harvard Law School and has written articles for The Harvard Theological Review and New England Quarterly. The award-winning book was published in 2007 by W.W. Norton and Co.
Former Boston Globe sports writer and foreign correspondent Steve Fainaru, now with the Washington Post, received the International Reporting Pulitzer for his stories on private security contractors in Iraq.
Another Pulitzer winner with New England ties is Washington Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein, who won for commentary. The grandson of the founder of the clothing store Louis Boston, Pearlstein was founding publisher and editor of The Boston Observer, an opinion journal. He began his journalism career as a reporter at the Foster's Daily Democrat and the Concord Monitor, both in New Hampshire.
Preston Gannaway, who received the 2008 Pulitzer in Feature Photography, is a former photographer for the Concord Monitor. Now a photographer for the Rocky Mountain News in Colorado, she was honored for her "intimate chronicle of a family coping with a parent's terminal illness.".
Novelist Junot Diaz, who won the Pulitzer for Fiction for "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,'' is a creative writing instructor at MIT who splits his time between apartments in Cambridge's Harvard Square and in Harlem.
Philip Schultz, who has taught fiction and poetry at the University of Massachusetts in Boston and Tufts University, received an award for "Failure," a collection of his poems.
The ninth person with New England ties honored today was David Lang, who received a degree from Yale University in 1989. He received a Pulitzer in Music for his composition "The Little Match Girl Passion."
The Pulitzer Prizes, first awarded in 1917, were created by newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer as a means to encourage excellence in the fields of journalism, letters, and drama.
