The Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing is one of the fourteen American Pulitzer Prizes that are annually awarded for Journalism. It has been awarded since 1979 for a distinguished example of feature writing giving prime consideration to high literary quality and originality.
Mary McGrory was an American journalist and columnist. She specialized in American politics, and was noted for her detailed coverage of political maneuverings. She wrote over 8,000 columns, but no books, and made very few media or lecture appearances.
Janet Leslie Cooke is an American former journalist. She received a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for an article written for The Washington Post. The story was later discovered to have been fabricated and Cooke returned the Pulitzer, the only person to date to do so, after admitting she had fabricated stories. The Pulitzer was instead awarded to Teresa Carpenter, a nominee who had lost to Cooke.
Mary Jessamyn West was an American author of short stories and novels, notably The Friendly Persuasion (1945). A Quaker from Indiana, she graduated from Fullerton Union High School in 1919 and Whittier College in 1923. There she helped found the Palmer Society in 1921. She received an honorary Doctor of Letters (Litt.D) degree from Whittier College in 1946. She received the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize in 1975.
Enrique's Journey: The Story of a Boy's Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with his Mother was a national best-seller by Sonia Nazario about a 17-year-old boy from Honduras who travels to the United States in search of his mother. It was first published in 2006 by Random House. The non-fiction book has been published in eight languages, and is sold in both English and Spanish editions in the United States. A young adult version was also published in 2013. The young adult version was published in Spanish in July 2015.
Laila Lalami is a Moroccan-American novelist, essayist, and professor. After earning her Licence de lettres degree in Morocco, she received a fellowship to study in the United Kingdom (UK), where she earned an MA in linguistics.
Amy Harmon is an American journalist. She won a Pulitzer Prize as a correspondent for The New York Times covering the impact of science and technology on everyday life. Harmon uses narrative storytelling to illuminate the human dilemmas posed by advances in science. In 2013, she was named a Guggenheim Fellow. Her daughter Sasha Matthews is a cartoonist.
Tomas Alexander Asuncion Tizon was a Filipino-American author and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. His book Big Little Man, a memoir and cultural history, explores themes related to race, masculinity, and personal identity. Tizon taught at the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication. His final story, titled "My Family's Slave", was published as the cover story of the June 2017 issue of The Atlantic after his death, sparking significant debate.
Isabel Wilkerson is an American journalist and the author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (2010) and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020). She is the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism.
Katherine "Kate" J. Boo is an American investigative journalist who has documented the lives of people in poverty. She has won the MacArthur "genius" award (2002) and the National Book Award for Nonfiction (2012), and her work earned the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for The Washington Post. She has been a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine since 2003. Her book Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity won nonfiction prizes from PEN, the Los Angeles Times Book Awards, the New York Public Library, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, in addition to the National Book Award for Nonfiction.
Andrea Elliott is an American journalist and a staff writer for The New York Times. She is the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in both Journalism (2007) and Letters (2022). She received the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for a series of articles on an Egyptian-born imam living in Brooklyn and the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City, a book about Dasani, a young girl enduring homelessness in New York City.
Rukmini Maria Callimachi is a Romanian-born American journalist. She currently works for The New York Times. She had been a Pulitzer Prize finalist four times. She hosted the NewYork Times podcast Caliphate, which won a Peabody Award, but the Times returned the award after an investigation cast doubt on a significant portion of the podcast.
Mary Catherine Jordan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, best-selling author and National Correspondent for the Washington Post.
Renée C. Byer (1958) was born in Yonkers, New York.
S. Lynne Walker is an American journalist who was the longtime Mexico City bureau chief for Copley News Service.
Katherine "Kay" Fanning was an American journalist and newspaper editor and publisher. She was editor and publisher of the Anchorage Daily News. In 1983, she became editor of the Christian Science Monitor in Boston, Massachusetts, becoming the first woman to edit an American national newspaper. She was the president of the American Society of News Editors from April 1987 to April 1988.
Latinos is a 27-part newspaper series on southern California's Latino community and culture of the early 1980s. The Los Angeles Times won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for the series. The winning team of two editors and 11 reporters and photographers who were all of Mexican American descent were the first Hispanics or Latinos to win the award. The Pulitzer Prize jury called the series "one of the largest reporting efforts in the newspaper's history" and noted that the news team had conducted over 1,000 interviews. The story of the newspaper series is the subject of the 2007 documentary Below the Fold.
Julie Cart, born in Louisiana, is an American journalist. She won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting, with her colleague, Bettina Boxall, for their series of stories looking at the cost and effectiveness of combating wildfires in the western United States. She has worked for the Los Angeles Times and several other news organizations. She currently covers environmental issues in the California state capitol as a writer with CalMatters
Bettina Boxall is an American journalist who covered water issues and the environment for the Los Angeles Times. She is a recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. She graduated in 1974, with honors, from the University of Maine in Orono. Boxall retired from the Times on May 3, 2022, after 34 years at the paper.
Al Martinez was a columnist for the Los Angeles Times. He also was known for his writings for several television shows, such as Hawaii Five-O in 1978, the short-lived 1980 police drama B.A.D. Cats, and Out on the Edge, a 1989 television movie starring Rick Schroder. His writings focused mainly on political, health, and social issues within the Latino American community.
