Bard College Faculty M. Gessen and Alumna Juliana Spahr ’88 Win Pulitzer Prizes
L–R: M. Gessen, distinguished visiting writer at Bard College, and Bard alumna Juliana Spahr ’88.
M. Gessen, distinguished visiting writer at Bard College, and Bard alumna Juliana Spahr ’88 have been awarded Pulitzer Prizes. The Pulitzer committee awarded Gessen a prize in Opinion Writing for their “illuminating collection of reported essays on rising authoritarian regimes that draw on history and personal experience to probe timely themes of oppression, belonging and exile.” Spahr was awarded a prize in Poetry for Ars Poeticas, a poetry collection examining her relationship to her art form, community, and politics. This year’s Pulitzer Prize recipients will constitute the 109th class of Pulitzer Prize winners.
The Pulitzer Prize in Opinion Writing is awarded for distinguished editorials, columns or other written commentary containing well-reasoned and compelling arguments on topics of public interest, whether originally researched and reported or informed by personal experience. Gessen’s series of New York Times Opinion articles, including “This Is the Feeling of Losing a Country. I Know It Well,” “How to be a Good Citizen When Your Country Does Bad Things,” and “The Chilling Consequences of Going Along With Trump,” demonstrate clarity, moral purpose, sound logic, engaging prose, and power to influence public opinion.
The Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, conferred for a distinguished volume of original verse by an American author, recognizes Spahr’s collection of lyric meditations on writing poetry in a time of ecological crisis and right wing populism. “In both her poetry and her academic work, Spahr takes as her central concern the relationship between literature and the state,” writes the New York Times about Ars Poeticas. “Accordingly, in this book, her sixth collection of poems, she writes about everything from climate change to the rise of the alt-right.”
M. Gessen is a distinguished visiting writer at Bard College and an Opinion columnist for the New York Times. They won a George Polk Award for opinion writing in 2024, and are the author of 11 non-fiction books, including most recently Surviving Autocracy (Riverhead Books, June 2020); The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, which won the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction; The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy, a 2015 award-winning account of the Boston Marathon bombers; and The Man without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, a 2012 portrait of the Russian leader that Foreign Affairs said, “shines a piercing light into every dark corner of Putin’s story.” They are the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, a Nieman Fellowship, the John Chancellor Award, the Hitchens Prize, and the Overseas Press Club Award for Best Commentary. After more than twenty years as a journalist and editor in Moscow, Gessen has been living in New York since 2013.
Post Date: 05-06-2026
The Pulitzer Prize in Opinion Writing is awarded for distinguished editorials, columns or other written commentary containing well-reasoned and compelling arguments on topics of public interest, whether originally researched and reported or informed by personal experience. Gessen’s series of New York Times Opinion articles, including “This Is the Feeling of Losing a Country. I Know It Well,” “How to be a Good Citizen When Your Country Does Bad Things,” and “The Chilling Consequences of Going Along With Trump,” demonstrate clarity, moral purpose, sound logic, engaging prose, and power to influence public opinion.
The Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, conferred for a distinguished volume of original verse by an American author, recognizes Spahr’s collection of lyric meditations on writing poetry in a time of ecological crisis and right wing populism. “In both her poetry and her academic work, Spahr takes as her central concern the relationship between literature and the state,” writes the New York Times about Ars Poeticas. “Accordingly, in this book, her sixth collection of poems, she writes about everything from climate change to the rise of the alt-right.”
M. Gessen is a distinguished visiting writer at Bard College and an Opinion columnist for the New York Times. They won a George Polk Award for opinion writing in 2024, and are the author of 11 non-fiction books, including most recently Surviving Autocracy (Riverhead Books, June 2020); The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, which won the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction; The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy, a 2015 award-winning account of the Boston Marathon bombers; and The Man without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, a 2012 portrait of the Russian leader that Foreign Affairs said, “shines a piercing light into every dark corner of Putin’s story.” They are the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, a Nieman Fellowship, the John Chancellor Award, the Hitchens Prize, and the Overseas Press Club Award for Best Commentary. After more than twenty years as a journalist and editor in Moscow, Gessen has been living in New York since 2013.
Juliana Spahr ’88 is a poet and scholar whose interests revolve around questions of transformation, language, and ecology. Spahr’s work crosses a variety of American landscapes, from the disappearing beaches of Hawaii to the small town of her Appalachian childhood. Her poems have focused on reading as a “communal, democratic, and open processm,” and her many books of poetry include That Winter the Wolf Came (2015); Well Then There Now (2011); The Transformation (2007); This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (2005); Things of Each Possible Relation Hashing Against One Another (2003); and Response (1996), which won a National Poetry Series Award. Spahr has also edited several volumes of essays and poetry, including Writing from the New Coast: Technique (1993); A Poetics of Criticism (1994); American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language (2002), with Claudia Rankine; and Poetry and Pedagogy: the Challenge of the Contemporary (2006). Spahr won the 2009 O.B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize. The prize, presented by the Folger Shakespeare Library, is given to US poets “whose art and teaching demonstrate great imagination and daring.” Spahr has taught at Siena College and at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She is currently an associate professor of English at Mills College.
Post Date: 05-06-2026