Pulitzer on the Road

The 2026 Pulitzer Prize winners are announced on Monday, May 4. Visit our website for details on the winners and finalists this year:

www.pulitzer.org

For decades, The Pulitzer Prizes have been associated with excellence in the real world of journalism, books, drama and music, but also in fictional shows, movies and comic books like The Muppet Show, Superman, The Simpsons, The Wire, and Sex and the City. But how did the Pulitzer Prizes become what they are today?

On this episode, our host Nicole Carroll, 2018 Explanatory Reporting winner and co-chair of the Pulitzer Prize board, is joined by fellow Pulitzer Board members, David Remnick of The New Yorker and 1994 General Nonfiction winner, and Carlos Lozada of The New York Times and 2019 Criticism winner, to go behind the scenes at The Pulitzer Prizes. They discuss their experiences of winning the prize, the judging process, the evolution of the prize categories, and how the history of the prizes really reflects the history of our country.

Resources:

You can find a transcript of this episode here. 

Learn more about Pulitzer on the Road and our upcoming events here. 

Read stories about The Pulitzer Prizes here.

On this episode, 2007 Poetry winner, Natasha Trethewey, and 2025 Memoir finalist, Lucy Sante, join each other at the 2026 AWP Conference for a conversation about memoir writing, and discuss how works rooted in personal experience can connect to larger narratives of race, historical erasure, gender, queerness, and class. 

Trethewey is a two-time US Poet Laureate and nonfiction writer, whose acclaimed 2020 memoir, Memorial Drive, was a New York Times Bestseller. Lucy Sante is a renowned cultural critic whose memoir I Heard Her Call My Name was a Pulitzer finalist and named Best Book of the Year by multiple media outlets.

The Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference (AWP) is an annual event that attracts over 10,000 writers, writing students, educators, publishing professionals and many others. Its 2026 conference took place in Baltimore. 

Resources:

You can find a transcript of this episode here. 

This conversation was edited from the live event, details of which are here.

Learn more about Pulitzer on the Road and our upcoming events here. 

Learn about AWP (the Association of Writers and Writing Programs) here

Listen to other conversations with Pulitzer authors

Jayne Anne Phillips and Viet Thanh Nguyen: On Writing and War

Barbara Kingsolver in Appalachia 

On this episode, 2019 International Reporting winner and photojournalist Nariman El-Mofty and Enric Martí, Deputy Director of Photography at Associated Press join Pulitzer Prizes Administrator Marjorie Miller at the International World Press Institute Congress in Vienna to discuss the work of photojournalists covering conflict zones, and how they continue to deliver searing images despite challenges to access. Then, Marjorie talks to 2025 Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting staff contributor Ivor Prickett about how he and Declan Walsh’s team at the New York Times covered the civil war in Sudan.

Resources:

Hannah Dreier, Iván Valencia and Gregory Bull: To the Border and Beyond

Mstyslav Chernov on Mariupol

Access to local news is in decline. In the last year, 213 US counties did not have any local news sources and 1500 counties had access to only one local news source. Meanwhile, research shows that communities need a shared set of facts in order to have a healthy democracy. In a lot of communities, high school newspapers and broadcasts are filling the gaps by covering local stories and holding officials accountable. In this episode, we go to the Fall National High School Journalism Convention in Nashville to meet some of these young journalists! 

Host Nicole Carroll, Co-chair of the Pulitzer Prize Board and director of NEWSWELL, is joined by 2025 Local Reporting winners Alissa Zhu and Jessica Gallagher of The Baltimore Banner and 2023 General Nonfiction co-winner Toluse Olorunnipa to discuss building trust in the communities they cover, the impact of their work, and how local stories can (and often do) have national reach. 

Resources:

You can find a transcript of this episode here. 

This conversation was edited from the live event, details of which are here.  

Learn more about Pulitzer on the Road and our upcoming events here. 

Learn about the National High School Journalism Convention here

If you enjoyed this episode, you may enjoy these previous episodes from the show:

Going Beyond the Data: with Trina Reynolds-Tyler, Sarah Conway and Salamishah Tillet

AL.com in Brookside, Alabama

Today, we’re sharing a special conversation from the podcast Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso.

The episode you’re about to hear aired just this month. It’s an entertaining and insightful talk with Percival Everett, who was named the winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction.

Together, they cover a range of topics, from his immersive process writing James, to teaching in the digital age, and why he still asks his students to watch Blazing Saddles by Mel Brooks.

If you’d like to hear more from Talk Easy, you can visit talkeasypod.com or search “Talk Easy” wherever you podcast.

Jayne Anne Phillips won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel, Night Watch, a vividly rendered account set in Phillips’ native West Virginia in the aftermath of the Civil War, that follows a severely wounded Union veteran, a 12-year-old girl and her traumatized mother as they struggle to heal. In this final episode of season two, she is in conversation with author Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Board member and 2016 winner for Fiction for his novel, The Sympathizer. Together the authors discuss writing about war, the transformative power of literature, and the ways knowledge is passed from one generation to the next.

To access this transcript and learn more about Jayne Anne Phillips’ Pulitzer-winning work, visit Pulitzer on the Road.

Jonathan Eig won the 2024 Pulitzer in Biography for King: A Life, a revelatory book on Martin Luther King Jr. that draws on new sources to enrich our understanding of the civil rights leader’s life. When Eig heard the 2024 Pulitzer-win for Audio Reporting, You Didn’t See Nothin, he knew he had to talk with the podcast host, Yohance Lacour of the Invisible Institute. In this award-winning podcast, Lacour revisits his reporting and experience of covering the 1997 brutal beating of 13-year-old Lenard Clark, a story that Eig also covered as a local journalist back in 1997. In this episode, the two writers discuss what it means to revisit old stories in order to offer new perspectives, the importance of collaboration, and the role journalism can still play in helping America heal from the past.

To access this transcript and learn more about Jonathan Eig and Yohance Lacour’s Pulitzer-winning work, visit Pulitzer on the Road.

In 2023, a record breaking number of migrants braved the harrowing journey to the U.S./Mexico border in hopes of being granted asylum in America. In this episode, we hear from three Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists who covered different stages of this experience. First, we hear from two photojournalist staff contributors to Associated Press’ 2024 Pulitzer win for Feature Photography: Iván Valencia walks us through the dangerous journey migrants experience crossing the Darien Gap, while Gregory Bull shows us the challenges migrants face once they reach the U.S. border. Finally, Hannah Dreier of The New York Times, winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting, sheds light on the exploitation that unaccompanied migrant children often face after successfully entering the U.S. 

To access this transcript and learn more about Iván Valencia, Gregory Bull and Hannah Dreier’s Pulitzer-winning work, visit Pulitzer on the Road.

Journalists Sarah Conway, formerly of City Bureau, and Trina Reynolds-Tyler of the Invisible Institute won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Local Reporting for Missing in Chicago, an investigation into how the Chicago Police Department has been handling missing person cases for Black girls and women. They’re joined by Salamishah Tillet, a Pulitzer-prize winner for Criticism and the co-founder of the organization, A Long Walk Home, to discuss their data- and community-driven reporting, how they analyzed one million police records, and the differences between journalism and activism.

To access this transcript and learn more about Trina Reynolds-Tyler and Sarah Conway’s Pulitzer-winning work, visit Pulitzer on the Road.