PROVIDENCE – A Brown University graduate has won a 2019 Pulitzer Prize for drama and a retired Brown professor has won a Pulitzer for poetry, according to the university.
Two other Brown graduates were part of newsgathering teams that won 2019 Pulitzer Prizes in journalism when the honors were announced last week.
Jackie Sibblies Drury, who earned her master’s degree in playwriting at Brown in 2010, won a Pulitzer for her play “Fairview,” a drama that examines race and power in America. Drury, born in Plainfield, N.J., is the daughter of Jamaican immigrants.
Literary arts emeritus Brown faculty member Forrest Gander won the Pulitzer for a book of poems titled “Be With,” a collection fueled by the death of his wife, C.D. Wright, in 2016. She was a longtime Brown faculty member. Gander retired in 2018.
Peter Kovacs, a 1978 Brown graduate, is editor of The Advocate in Baton Rouge, La. He led a team of reporters that earned the Pulitzer for local reporting. The newspaper shined a light on Louisiana’s discriminatory conviction system.
Rebecca Ballhaus, a 2013 Brown graduate, was part of a reporting team at The Wall Street Journal that won the Pulitzer for national reporting for uncovering President Donald Trump’s secret payoffs to two women who claim to have had affairs with him.
