Pulitzer 2025

The story of the Combahee River Raid, one of Harriet Tubman's most extraordinary accomplishments, based on original documents and written by a descendant of one of the participants.Most Americans know of Harriet Tubman's legendary life: escaping enslavement in 1849, she led more than 60 others out of bondage via the Underground Railroad, gave instructions on getting to freedom to scores more, and went on to live a lifetime fighting for change. Yet the many biographies, children's books, and films about Tubman omit a crucial chapter: during the Civil War, hired by the Union Army, she ventured into the heart of slave territory—Beaufort, South Carolina—to live, work, and gather intelligence for a daring raid up the Combahee River to attack the major plantations of Rice Country, the breadbasket of the Confederacy.Edda L. Fields-Black — herself a descendant of one of the participants in the raid — shows how Tubman commanded a ring of spies, scouts, and pilots and participated in military expeditions behind Confederate lines. On June 2, 1863, Tubman and her crew piloted two regiments of Black U.S. Army soldiers, the Second South Carolina Volunteers, and their white commanders up coastal South Carolina's Combahee River in three gunboats. In a matter of hours, they torched eight rice plantations and liberated 730 people, people whose Lowcountry Creole language and culture Tubman could not even understand. Black men who had liberated themselves from bondage on South Carolina's Sea Island cotton plantations after the Battle of Port Royal in November 1861 enlisted in the Second South Carolina Volunteers and risked their lives in the effort.Using previously unexamined documents, including Tubman's U.S. Civil War pension file, bills of sale, wills, marriage settlements, and estate papers from planters' families, Fields-Black brings to life intergenerational, extended enslaved families, neighbors, praise-house members, and sweethearts forced to work in South Carolina's deadly tidal rice swamps, sold, and separated during the antebellum period. When Tubman and the gunboats arrived and blew their steam whistles, many of those people clambered aboard, sailed to freedom, and were eventually reunited with their families. The able-bodied Black men freed in the Combahee River Raid enlisted in the Second South Carolina Volunteers and fought behind Confederate lines for the freedom of others still enslaved not just in South Carolina but Georgia and Florida.After the war, many returned to the same rice plantations from which they had escaped, purchased land, married, and buried each other. These formerly enslaved people on the Sea Island indigo and cotton plantations, together with those in the semi-urban port cities of Charleston, Beaufort, and Savannah, and on rice plantations in the coastal plains, created the distinctly American Gullah Geechee dialect, culture, and identity—perhaps the most significant legacy of Harriet Tubman's Combahee River Raid.

In this magisterial history, Kathleen DuVal tells the story of Native nations, from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to the present, reframing North American history with Indigenous power and sovereignty at its center. Before and during European colonization, Indigenous North Americans built diverse civilizations and lived in history, adapting to a changing world in ways that reverberated globally. As DuVal explains, no civilization came to a halt when a few wandering explorers arrived, even when the strangers came well-armed.A millennium ago, North American cities rivaled urban centers around the world in size, but following a period of climate change and instability, DuVal shows how numerous smaller nations emerged from previously centralized civilizations, moving away from rather than toward urbanization. From this urban past, patterns of egalitarian government structures, diplomacy, and complex economies spread across North America. So, when Europeans arrived in the sixteenth century, they encountered societies they did not understand, having developed differently from their own, and whose power they often underestimated. For centuries after these first encounters, Indigenous people maintained an upper hand and used Europeans in pursuit of their own interests. In Native Nations, we see how Mohawks closely controlled trade with the Dutch—and influenced global markets—and how Quapaws manipulated French colonists. Power dynamics shifted after the American Revolution, but Indigenous people continued to control the majority of the continent. Shawnee brothers Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa forged new alliances and encouraged a controversial new definition of Native identity to attempt to wall off U.S. ambitions. The Cherokees created new institutions to assert their sovereignty on the global stage, and the Kiowas used their preponderance of power in the west to regulate the passage of white settlers across their territory.In this important addition to the growing tradition of North American history centered on Indigenous nations, Kathleen DuVal uses these stories to show how the definitions of power and means of exerting it shifted over time, but the sovereignty and influence of Native peoples remained a constant and will continue far into the future.A sweeping history of the power of Indigenous North America from ancient cities to fights for sovereignty that continue today, from an award-winning historian

A lively and intimate biography of trailblazing and era-defining New Yorker editor Katharine S. White, who helped build the magazine's prestigious legacy and transform the 20th-century literary landscape for women. In the summer of 1925, Katharine Sergeant Angell White walked into The New Yorker's midtown office and left with a job as an editor. The magazine was only a few months old. Over the next thirty-six years, White would transform the publication into a literary powerhouse. This exquisite biography brings to life the remarkable relationships White fostered with her writers and how these relationships nurtured an astonishing array of literary talent. She edited a young John Updike, to whom she sent seventeen rejections before a single acceptance, as well as Vladimir Nabokov, with whom she fought incessantly, urging that he drop needlessly obscure or confusing words. White's biggest contribution, however, was her cultivation of women writers whose careers were made at The New Yorker—Janet Flanner, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, Jean Stafford, Nadine Gordimer, Elizabeth Taylor, Emily Hahn, Kay Boyle, and more. She cleared their mental and financial obstacles, introduced them to each other, and helped them create now-classic stories and essays. She propelled these women to great literary heights and, in the process, reinvented the role of the editor, transforming the relationship to be not just a way to improve a writer's work but also their lives. Based on years of scrupulous research, Amy Reading creates a rare and deeply intimate portrait of a prolific editor—through both her tenure at The New Yorker and her marriage to E.B. White—and reveals how she transformed our understanding of literary culture and community.

In her evocative, genre-defying graphic memoir, Tessa Hulls tells the stories of her grandmother, Sun Yi; her mother, Rose; and herself.Sun Yi was a Shanghai journalist caught in the political crosshairs of the 1949 Communist victory. After eight years of government harassment, she fled to Hong Kong with her daughter. Upon arrival, Sun Yi wrote a bestselling memoir about her persecution and survival, used the proceeds to put Rose in an elite boarding school—and promptly had a breakdown that left her committed to a mental institution.Tessa watched her mother care for Sun Yi, both of them struggling under the weight of Sun Yi's unexamined trauma and mental illness. Vowing to escape her mother’s smothering fear, Tessa left home and traveled to the farthest-flung corners of the globe (Antarctica). But at the age of thirty, it starts to feel less like freedom and more like running away, and she returns to face the history that shaped her.By turns fascinating and heartbreaking, inventive and poignant, it exposes the fear and trauma that haunt generations, and the love that holds them together.An astonishing, deeply moving graphic memoir about three generations of Chinese women, exploring love, grief, exile, and identity. Gorgeously rendered, Feeding Ghosts is Hulls' homecoming, a vivid journey into the beating heart of one family, set against the dark backdrop of Chinese history.

“Fair to say, I was in a ribald state the summer before my fiftieth birthday.” And so begins Alexandra Fuller’s open, vivid new memoir, Fi. It’s midsummer in Wyoming and Alexandra is barely hanging on. Grieving her father and pining for her home country of Zimbabwe, reeling from a midlife breakup, freshly sober and piecing her way uncertainly through a volatile new relationship with a younger woman, Alexandra vows to get herself back on an even keel.And then—suddenly and incomprehensibly—her son Fi, at 21 years old, dies in his sleep.No stranger to loss—young siblings, a parent, a home country—Alexandra is nonetheless leveled. At the same time, she is painfully aware that she cannot succumb and abandon her two surviving daughters as her mother before her had done. From a sheep wagon deep in the mountains of Wyoming to a grief sanctuary in New Mexico to a silent meditation retreat in Alberta, Canada, Alexandra journeys up and down the spine of the Rocky Mountains in an attempt to find how to grieve herself whole. There is no answer, and there are countless answers—in poetry, in rituals and routines, in nature and in the indigenous wisdom she absorbed as a child in Zimbabwe. By turns disarming, devastating and unexpectedly, blessedly funny, Alexandra recounts the wild medicine of painstakingly grieving a child in a culture that has no instructions for it.

Lucy Sante had enough reasons to feel like an outsider. Born in Belgium, the one child of conservative Catholic working-class parents who transplanted their little family to the United States without ever entirely settling here, she only really felt at home when she moved to New York City in the early 1970s, a feral moment in which she found her people among a band of fellow bohemians picking their way through the wreckage. Some of her friends would die young, to drugs and AIDS, and some would become jarringly famous. Lucy flirted with both fates, on her way to building an estimable career as a writer. But in the deepest sense, she still felt like an outsider, her life a performance. She was presenting a façade, even to herself.Sante's memoir braids together two threads of personal narrative, the arc of her life, and her recent step-by-step transition to a place of inner and outer alignment. A marvel of grace and empathy, I Heard Her Call My Name parses with great sensitivity many issues that touch our lives deeply, having to do with gender identity and far beyond.

The industrializing North and the agricultural South—that’s how we have been taught to think about the United States in the early nineteenth century. But in doing so, we overlook the economic ties that held the nation together before the Civil War. We miss slavery’s long reach into small New England communities, just as we fail to see the role of Northern manufacturing in shaping the terrain of human bondage in the South. Using plantation goods—the shirts, hats, hoes, shovels, shoes, axes, and whips made in the North for use in the South—historian Seth Rockman locates the biggest stories in American history in the everyday objects that stitched together the lives and livelihoods of Americans—white and Black, male and female, enslaved and free—across an expanding nation.By following the stories of material objects, such as shoes made by Massachusetts farm women that found their way to the feet of a Mississippi slave, Rockman reveals a national economy organized by slavery—a slavery that outsourced the production of its supplies to the North, and a North that outsourced its slavery to the South. Melding business and labor history through powerful storytelling, Plantation Goods brings northern industrialists, southern slaveholders, enslaved field hands, and paid factory laborers into the same picture. In one part of the country, entrepreneurs envisioned fortunes to be made from “planter’s hoes” and rural women spent their days weaving “negro cloth” and assembling “slave brogans.” In another, enslaved people actively consumed textiles and tools imported from the North to contest their bondage. In between, merchants, marketers, storekeepers, and debt collectors lay claim to the profits of a thriving interregional trade.Examining producers and consumers linked in economic and moral relationships across great geographic and political distances, Plantation Goods explores how people in the nineteenth century thought about complicity with slavery while showing how slavery structured life nationwide and established a modern world of entrepreneurship and exploitation. Rockman brings together lines of American history that have for too long been told separately, as slavery and capitalism converge in something as deceptively ordinary as a humble pair of shoes.An eye-opening rethinking of nineteenth-century American history that reveals the interdependence of the Northern industrial economy and Southern slave labor.

In the 18th century, two men dedicated their lives to the same daunting task: identifying and describing all life on Earth. Their approaches could not have been more different. Carl Linnaeus, a pious Swedish doctor with a huckster's flair, believed that life belonged in tidy, static categories. Georges-Louis de Buffon, an aristocratic polymath and keeper of France's royal garden, viewed life as a dynamic swirl of complexities. Both began believing their work to be difficult, but not impossible—how could the planet possibly hold more than a few thousand species? Stunned by life's diversity, both fell far short of their goal. But in the process they articulated starkly divergent views on nature, on humanity's role in shaping the fate of our planet and on humanity itself.The rivalry between these two unique, driven individuals created reverberations that still echo today. Linnaeus, with the help of acolyte explorers he called "apostles" (only half of whom returned alive), gave the world such concepts as mammal, primate and homo sapiens—but he also denied species change and promulgated racist pseudo-science. Buffon coined the term reproduction, formulated early prototypes of evolution and genetics, and argued passionately against prejudice. It was a clash that, during their lifetimes, Buffon seemed to be winning. But their posthumous fates would take a very different turn.With elegant, propulsive prose grounded in more than a decade of research, Jason Roberts tells an unforgettable true-life tale of intertwined lives and enduring legacies, tracing an arc of insight and discovery that extends across three centuries into the present day.This dramatic, globe-spanning and meticulously researched story of two scientific rivals and their race to survey all life on Earth.

A comprehensive, authoritative biography of Civil Rights icon John Lewis, “the conscience of the Congress,” drawing on interviews with Lewis and approximately 275 others who knew him at various stages of his life, as well as never-before-used FBI files and documents.Born into poverty in rural Alabama, Lewis became second only to Martin Luther King Jr. in his contributions to the Civil Rights Movement. He was a Freedom Rider who helped to integrate bus stations in the South, a leader of the Nashville sit-in movement, the youngest speaker at the 1963 March on Washington, and the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which he made into one of the major civil rights organizations. He may be best remembered as the victim of a vicious beating by Alabama state troopers at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where he nearly died.Greenberg’s biography traces Lewis’s life through the post–Civil Rights years, when he headed the Voter Education Project, which enrolled millions of African American voters across the South. The book reveals the little-known story of his political ascent first locally in Atlanta and then as a member of Congress. Tapped to be a part of the Democratic leadership in Congress, he earned respect on both sides of the aisle for the sacrifices he had made on behalf of nonviolent integration in the South and came to be known as the “conscience of the Congress.”Thoroughly researched and dramatically told, Greenberg’s biography captures John Lewis’s influential career through documents from dozens of archives, interviews with hundreds of people who knew Lewis, and long-lost footage of Lewis himself speaking to reporters from his hospital bed following his severe beating on “Bloody Sunday” in Selma. With new details about his personal and professional relationships, John Lewis: A Life is the definitive biography of a man whose heroism during the Civil Rights Movement helped to bring America a new birth of freedom.

Beginning in the 1960s, the Soviet Union was unexpectedly confronted by a dissident movement that captured the world’s imagination. Demanding that the Kremlin obey its own laws, an improbable band of Soviet citizens held unauthorized public gatherings, petitioned in support of arrested intellectuals, and circulated banned samizdat texts. Soviet authorities arrested dissidents, subjected them to bogus trials and vicious press campaigns, sentenced them to psychiatric hospitals and labor camps, sent them into exile—and transformed them into martyred heroes. Against all odds, the dissident movement undermined the Soviet system and unexpectedly hastened its collapse. Taking its title from a toast made at dissident gatherings, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause is a definitive history of a remarkable group of people who helped change the twentieth century.Benjamin Nathans’s vivid narrative tells the dramatic story of the men and women who became dissidents—from Nobel laureates Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn to many others who are virtually unknown today. Drawing on diaries, memoirs, personal letters, interviews, and KGB interrogation records, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause reveals how dissidents decided to use Soviet law to contain the power of the Soviet state. This strategy, as one of them put it, was “simple to the point that, in an unfree country, they began to conduct themselves like free people.”An extraordinary account of the Soviet dissident movement, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause shows how dissidents spearheaded the struggle to break free of the USSR’s totalitarian past, a struggle that continues in Putin’s Russia—and that illuminates other struggles between hopelessness and perseverance today.A gripping history of the Soviet dissident movement, which hastened the end of the USSR—and still provides a model of opposition in Putin’s Russia

An indispensable collection of more than three decades of profound, luminous poetry from acclaimed poet Marie Howe. Marie Howe’s poetry transforms penetrating observations of everyday life into sacred, humane miracles. This essential volume draws from each of Howe’s four previous collections — including What the Living Do (1997), a haunting archive of personal loss, and the National Book Award–longlisted Magdalene (2017), a spiritual and sensual exploration of contemporary womanhood — and contains more than fifteen new poems. Whether speaking in the voice of the goddess Persephone or thinking about aging while walking the dog, Howe explores human sorrow and ordinary joy.From “The Maples”Stand still. I thought to myself ever distracted, always in a hurrylearn to stand there―if only for one minute―drinking light and breathing.Endorsements“a radical simplicity and seriousness of purpose, along with a fearless interest in autobiography and its tragedies and redemptions” — Matthew Zapruder, New York Times Magazine“a light-bearer, an extraordinary poet of our human sorrow and ordinary joy” — Dorianne Laux

Written after two years of artistic silence, during which the world came to a halt due to the COVID pandemic and Minneapolis became the epicenter of protest following the murder of George Floyd, Bluff is Danez Smith’s powerful reckoning with their role and responsibility as a poet and with their hometown of the Twin Cities.This is a book of awakening out of violence, guilt, shame, and critical pessimism to wonder and imagine how we can strive toward new existence in a world that seems to be dissolving into desolate futures.Smith brings a startling urgency to these poems, their questions demanding a new language, a deep self-scrutiny, and virtuosic textual shapes. A series of “ars poetica” gives way to “anti poetica” and “ars america” to implicate poetry’s collusions with unchecked capitalism. A photographic collage accrues across a sequence to make clear the consequences of American acceptance of mass shootings. A brilliant long poem—part map, part annotation, part visual argument—offers the history of Saint Paul’s vibrant Rondo neighborhood before and after the city decided to run an interstate directly through it.Bluff is a kind of manifesto about artistic resilience, even when time and will can seem fleeting, when the places we most love—those given and made—are burning. In this soaring collection, Smith turns to honesty, hope, rage, and imagination to envision futures that seem possible.

When Gauri Lankesh, an outspoken journalist in the South Indian city of Bangalore, was assassinated in September 2017 outside her home, it wasn’t just a loss to her close-knit community of writers and activists—the shock reverberated nationwide, making headlines and sparking mass protests. Why was she targeted, and who was behind it? Following the case to its stunning, unsettling conclusion, Rollo Romig uncovers a world of political extremists, fearless writers, organized crime, and shadowy religious groups. I Am on the Hit List is an epic narrative that moves between a historic booksellers’ district and brand-new high rises funded by IT wealth, to a secretive ashram in Goa and the kitchens of an international vegetarian restaurant chain, boldly interrogating whether we can break the cycle of polarization and bloodshed inspiring political murder across the globe.A gripping investigation into the mysterious assassination of a journalist in India, revealing the courage and vulnerability of those who are fighting the decline of democracy around the world.

The poignant saga of Guatemala’s adoption system as an international marketplace for children, built on a foundation of inequality, war, and Indigenous dispossession.In 2009 Dolores Preat went to a small Maya town in Guatemala to find her birth mother. At the address retrieved from her adoption file, she was told that her supposed mother, one Rosario Colop Chim, never gave up a child for adoption — but in 1984 a girl across the street was abducted. At that house, Preat met a woman who strongly resembled her. Colop Chim, it turned out, was not Preat’s mother at all, but a jaladora — a baby broker.Some 40,000 children, many Indigenous, were kidnapped or otherwise coercively parted from families scarred by Guatemala’s civil war or made desperate by unrelenting poverty. Amid the US-backed army’s genocide against Indigenous Maya, children were wrested from their villages and put up for adoption illegally, mostly in the United States. During the war’s second decade, adoption was privatized, overseen by lawyers who made good money matching children to overseas families. Private adoptions skyrocketed to the point where tiny Guatemala overtook giants like China and Russia as a “sender” state. Drawing on government archives, oral histories, and a rare cache of adoption files opened briefly for war crimes investigations, Rachel Nolan explores the human toll of an international industry that thrives on exploitation.Would-be parents in rich countries have fostered a commercial market for children from poor countries, with Guatemala becoming the most extreme case. Until I Find You reckons with the hard truths of a practice that builds loving families in the Global North out of economic exploitation, endemic violence, and dislocation in the Global South.

An Authentic Life is an exacting and fearless interrogation of the education one receives from the institutions of academia and family.Sprawling yet urgent, meditative yet lucid, the poems in Jennifer Chang’s anticipated third collection, An Authentic Life, offer a bold examination of a world deeply influenced by war and patriarchy. In dialogues against literature, against philosophy, and against God, Chang interrogates the “fathers” who stand at the center of history. Poems navigate wounds opened by explorations of family and generational trauma, and draw on the author’s experiences as a mother, as the daughter of immigrants, and as a citizen of our deeply divided nation. Here, the patriarchal violence of history becomes intimate, brought down to a domestic scale. A woman sweeping the floor cannot escape thoughts of war, or her dying mother, while another scene shows friends questioning the “despite-ness” of love. In poems where the lyric is reimagined as porous, discursive, and bursting open, Chang fearlessly confronts the forms of knowledge that hold power. Meticulous and masterful, An Authentic Life creates a world where we can begin “to unlearn everything.”

When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.While many narrative set pieces of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river’s banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin…), Jim’s agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and ferociously funny, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view.

An unexpected tragedy at a community pool. A family’s unrelenting expectation of victory. The desire to gain or lose control; to make time speed up or stop; to be frighteningly, undeniably good at something. Each of the eight teenage girl boxers in this blistering debut novel has her own reasons for the sacrifices she has made to come to Reno, Nevada, to compete to be named the best in the country. Through a series of face-offs that are raw, ecstatic, and punctuated by flashes of humor and tenderness, prizewinning writer Rita Bullwinkel animates the competitors’ pasts and futures as they summon the emotion, imagination, and force of will required to win.Frenetic, surprising, and strikingly original, Headshot is a portrait of the desire, envy, perfectionism, madness, and sheer physical pleasure that motivates young women to fight—even, and perhaps especially, when no one else is watching.EndorsementsAn electrifying debut novel from an “unusually gifted writer” about the radical intimacy of physical competition — Lorrie Moore

Stacey Levine's new novel recounts a pivotal day in the fraught relationship of two orphaned sisters through the eyes of their obsessively observant housekeeper. Will Jody be able to cope if her younger sibling Mice, subject to constant harassment in their community for her unusual appearance and habits, leaves home? How will their all-watching companion convey her fierce attachment to them both? When they cross paths with an unsettling stranger at a neighborhood party, the three women are driven toward momentous changes. Set in southern Florida at the peak of Cold War hysteria, Mice 1961 is a powerful meditation on belonging and separateness, conformity and otherness.Endorsements“Stacey Levine’s fiction is unlike anything else. Peculiar, vivid, preternaturally alert to the strangeness of the human condition, Mice 1961 is terrific.” — Kelly Link

Marking a dramatic new direction for Jones, a riveting tale set in the post–World War II South, narrated by a Black soldier who returns to Jim Crow and searches for a mythical ideal.Set in the early 1950s, this novel from Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist Gayl Jones follows the witty but perplexing army veteran Buddy Ray Guy as he embodies the fate of Black soldiers who return, not in glory, but into their Jim Crow communities.A cook and tractor repairman, Buddy was known as Budweiser to his army pals because he’s a wise guy. But underneath that surface, he is a self-educated intellectual and a classic searching for religion, meaning, and love.As he moves around the South, from his hometown of Lexington, Kentucky, primarily, to his second home of Memphis, Tennessee, he recalls his love affairs in post-war France and encounters a variety of colorful characters and mythical circus barkers, topiary trimmers, landladies who provide shelter and plenty of advice for their all-Black clientele, proto-feminists, and bigots. The lead among these characters is, of course, the Unicorn Woman, who exists but mostly lives in Bud’s private mythology.Jones offers a rich, intriguing exploration of Black (and Indigenous) people in a time and place of frustration, disappointment, and spiritual hope.