Two Northwestern alumni joined the school’s long list of Pulitzer Prize winners this year in the categories of local reporting and drama.
The 2011 prize was awarded to Frank Main (MSJ ’87) for his documentation of violence in Chicago neighborhoods for the Chicago Sun-Times, and playwright Bruce Norris (Communication ’82) for his latest work, “Clybourne Park,” a racial satire in response to Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” that examines a changing Chicago community throughout the second half of the 20th century.
Main shared the award with his Sun-Times colleagues Mark Konkol and John J. Kim. The award is the Sun-Times’ first since 1989, its eighth all together.
Beyond the Pulitzer, Norris’s “Clybourne Park” has received the 2010 Evening Standard award for best play, the Stein Playwright Award, the Whiting Foundation prize for best drama and two Chicago Jefferson awards for best new work.
The Pulitzer jury called the play “a powerful work whose memorable characters speak in witty and perceptive ways to America’s sometimes toxic struggle with race and class consciousness.”
Norris’s drama will open at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago this September. Northwestern University Press will also be publishing it in a forthcoming anthology of new plays coedited by NU professors.
The Pulitzer Prize annually recognizes excellence in journalism and the arts in 21 different categories. It was established in 1917 and named after newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer. Since then, more than 30 graduates of the Medill School of Journalism alone have won the prize.
