PULITZER PRIZE RESPECT

For This Year's Commitment To Diversity, Courage + The Truth

image above: buzzfeed's coverage of china's uighur detention camps; cover image: richmond confederate statue demonstration

BY: Ramona Duoba

The prestigious Pulitzer Prizes are awarded annually for newspaper, magazine, and online journalism, literature, and musical composition. Established in 1917 by newspaper publishing giant Joseph Pulitzer, the awards are administered by Columbia University. Of the twenty-one categories, below are Provokr’s favorite wins for 2021.

In International Reporting, Meghan Rajagopalan, Alison Killing, and Christo Buschek of Buzzfeed News won the Pulitzer Prize for a series of innovative articles. Their use of satellite images, 3D architectural models, and daring interviews with two dozen former prisoners exposed China’s vast infrastructure for detaining hundreds of thousands of Muslims. This is the digital outlet’s first win since it was founded in 2012.

**Survivors of the detention camps talk to BuzzFeed**

BuzzFeed's coverage of Uighur detention camps in China — **BuzzFeed’s coverage of Uighur detention camps in China**

Michael Paul Williams of The Richmond (VA) Times-Dispatch was recognized for penning “penetrating and historically insightful columns that guided Richmond, a former capital of the Confederacy, through the painful and complicated process of dismantling the city’s monuments to white supremacy.” The entry consisted of five opinion pieces he wrote between early June and mid-August of 2020 on removing the city’s Confederate statues. This is the third Pulitzer winner in the newspaper’s history.

**Richmond Confederate Statues Coming down**

The Night Watchman, Louise Erdrich’s novel, is the 2021 winner for Fiction. The Pulitzer Prize judges praised her book as “a majestic, polyphonic novel about a community’s efforts to halt the proposed displacement and elimination of several Native American tribes in the 1950s, rendered with dexterity and imagination.” The author based her novel on her grandfather’s life, who worked as a factory night watchman and took the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota to Congress. Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, said after the win, “I’m so happy about this because I felt so close to what my grandfather was going through in this book. I hope he knows that he won the Pulitzer. I really do.”

Louise Erdich's The Night Watchman — **Louise Erdich’s The Night Watchman**

Natalie Diaz was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Post Colonial Love Poem. Described by the judges as “a collection of tender, heart-warming and defiant poems that explore what it means to love and be loved in an America beset by conflict.” Postcolonial Love Poem was also a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award, the 2020 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the 2020 Forward Prize for Best Collection. It was also shortlisted for the 2020 T.S. Eliot Prize. Diaz, 42, was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. She is an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe.

**Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz**

Daniella Frazier won the citation “for courageously recording the murder of George Floyd, a video that spurred protests against police brutality around the world,” according to the Pulitzer Prize Board. Her video highlights the crucial role of citizen journalists and their quest for truth and justice. Then 17 years old, Frazier went to the store with her young cousin when she saw Chauvin and other officers restrain Floyd. She recorded the incident on her cell phone as bystanders pleaded with the officer to get off Floyd, who repeatedly said he couldn’t breathe.