In a major literary coup, James Forman Jr. ’88 and Andrew Sean Greer ’92, earned 2018 Pulitzer prizes for fiction and general nonfiction. Forman (left) won for his first book, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, about the role black leaders unwittingly played in the mass incarceration of black men. A former clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, Forman, a professor at Yale Law School writes, “Far from ignoring the issue of crime by blacks against other blacks, African-American officials and their constituents have been consumed by it.” The New York Times called Forman’s book “superb and shattering.” Greer (right) earned his award for his fifth novel, Less, the story of a failed novelist nearing 50 who goes on a world tour of obscure literary events to avoid attending his ex-boyfriend’s wedding. The Washington Post called the book “laugh-till-you-can’t-breathe funny.” On Twitter, Greer says Less is “about the foolishness of American myopia, the uneasiness of being gay in the world, the difficulties of love, but most of all it is about joy.”
