Nine alumni hailing from four University of California campuses were awarded Pulitzer Prizes this week (May 5) by Columbia University in the categories of reporting, history, and nonfiction. The Pulitzer Prize, bestowed annually on recommendation of the Pulitzer Prize Board, is one of the most prestigious honors in journalism, literature and music composition.
Six alums earn journalism accolades
Five UC Berkeley alums were awarded Pulitzers for their reporting. Journalism school alums Parker Yesko and Catherine Winter were part of The New Yorker team that won the Pulitzer Prize in audio reporting for the investigative podcast “In the Dark,” now in its third season. The Committee described the podcast as “a combination of compelling storytelling and relentless reporting” in its distillation of four years of investigation into one of the most high-profile Iraq War crimes — the massacre of 25 unarmed Iraqi civilians in Haditha.
Sharon Steinmann of the Pulitzer-winning Houston Chronicle team.
Another pair of UC Berkeley alums, Sharon Steinmann and Leah Binkovitz, were awarded the Pulitzer Prize in editorial writing for their Houston Chronicle series on failures of railroads and state officials to protect residents from the dangers and inconveniences of stopped and slow-moving trains, especially in lower-income neighborhoods, often near schools. One local high school student, Sergio Rodriguez, died while trying to cross a track to get to school, and other schoolchildren frequently rush across the tracks or even crawl under stalled trains. The series highlighted the problem and proposed solutions. “Their coverage and advocacy have spurred progress,” the Houston Chronicle noted on the win, “leading to the Texas Senate's approval of a new $350 million grant program.”
“Honestly, I was in disbelief in the moment,” Steinmann told UC Berkeley Social Sciences. “But I’m hopeful that our kids in Houston will get safer passages to school now that this series is getting attention.”
“I have so much appreciation for my art history background. I believe it really taught me to see and observe,” Binkovitz reflected on the award. “That’s the basis for discoveries of all sorts. Just like this rail series and so much of my work, that [senior thesis] paper tried to capture the meeting point of people and systems: How do we live in these bigger systems, and how do we challenge or subvert their order?”
UC Berkeley Journalism School alum Greg Winter had a hand in not one, but two Pulitzer wins for The New York Times, where he is the international managing editor. The first is for explanatory reporting for an investigation that uncovered a campaign of forced disappearances in Afghanistan which helped drive citizens to the Taliban; another, in international reporting, focused on the ongoing civil war in Sudan, including foreign influence on the war and the gold trade fueling it, which the Committee described as “revelatory” and “chilling.”
UC Irvine MFA alumna Stacy Kranitz won the Pulitzer for public service for her contributions to ProPublica reporting on pregnant women who died after doctors delayed urgently needed care, out of fears that care would violate vague “life of the mother” exceptions in states with strict abortion bans. Her photo essay, “The Year After a Denied Abortion,” documented the unraveling of a Tennessee family after a denied abortion for a life-threatening pregnancy and highlighted the meager support there for poor mothers. The winning series became a talking point during the 2024 election and has helped to increase awareness of the dangers of current legislation and spurred the passage of new bills; Texas Senate Bill 31, written by the author of the original state ban on abortion, state Sen. Bryan Hughes, “aims to prevent maternal deaths under the state’s strict abortion ban by making clear that a life-threatening medical emergency doesn’t need to be imminent for doctors to follow their medical standards and intervene to terminate pregnancies,” per ProPublica.
Three alums win for literature
Three UC alums won Pulitzers for literary works in biography, general nonfiction, and history.
UC Santa Cruz alum Jason Roberts was awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for biography for his book “Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life,” which traces the parallel 18th-century scientific journeys of Carl Linnaeus and Georges-Louis de Buffon, who independently worked to classify and understand the natural world, often drawing radically different conclusions, in efforts that still shape our scientific thinking today. The Committee took note of its compelling format, noting it as “a beautifully written double biography.”
“I’ve lately been drawn to write what I call human scale history, nonfiction narratives that feature forgotten or neglected figures from the past — people whose stories deserve to be reclaimed as part of our cultural heritage,” Roberts shared on his website. “Given the under-documented nature of such subjects, the work necessarily goes slowly. But it’s more than worthwhile.”
Benjamin Nathans
UC Berkeley alumnus Benjamin Nathans, Alan Charles Kors Endowed Term Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, was awarded the Pulitzer for general nonfiction for his book “To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement.” The Committee describes the book as “a prodigiously researched and revealing history of Soviet dissent, how it was repeatedly put down and came to life again, populated by a sprawling cast of courageous people dedicated to fighting for threatened freedoms and hard-earned rights.” Nathans’ book joins the stories of well-known figures and Nobel laureates Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn with other activists on the ground who sought to turn the Soviet Union’s tyranny back on itself; as one of the dissidents in the book comments, “in an unfree country, they began to conduct themselves like free people.”
Nathans told UC Berkeley Social Sciences he was “stunned by this news, deeply honored, and grateful for the tremendous support” he received “from friends, family, and colleagues over the years.”
“I am interested in how people who live in authoritarian societies construe their options for public political engagement — and how they act on them,” Nathans said. “My particular interest was in the Soviet Union, but the topic applies to many different societies.”
The Pulitzer Prize for history was awarded to Kathleen DuVal, a UC Davis alumna who is the Bowman and Gordon Gray Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her book, “Native Nations: A Millennium in North America,” is, as described by the Committee, “a panoramic portrait of Native American nations and communities over a thousand years, a vivid and accessible account of their endurance, ingenuity and achievement in the face of conflict and dispossession.” The book centers history from an Indigenous perspective and describes shifts in population and political organization, inclusive but not limited to a response to the arrival of European settlers, over the course of 1,000 years.
Read more:
UC Berkeley School of Journalism: Pulitzer honors Berkeley Journalism faculty, alums and Investigative Reporting Program
UC Santa Cruz: UC Santa Cruz alumnus wins Pulitzer
