Four alumni won coveted Pulitzer Prizes in journalism and the arts this year. Alex Mierjeski ’17JRN shared the prize for public-service journalism with his ProPublica colleagues for their reporting on corruption at the Supreme Court, while Tyshawn Sorey ’17GSAS took home the Pulitzer for music for his saxophone concerto Adagio (For Wadada Leo Smith). Ilyon Woo ’04GSAS was awarded a prize in the biography category for Master Slave Husband Wife, about abolitionists Ellen and William Craft, and Nathan Thrall ’06GSAS won for general nonfiction for his book A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy.
Writer V. V. Ganeshananthan ’07JRN won the 2024 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction and the United Kingdom’s Women’s Prize for Fiction for Brotherless Night, a novel about an aspiring doctor caught up in the Sri Lankan civil war.
At the 2024 Empire State Senior Games in Cortland, New York, Robert Gamer ’72GS, a veteran of the United States Air Force, won four gold medals in swimming for men ages 80 to 84. The achievement qualified him for the 2025 National Senior Games.
Food and travel reporter Diana Hubbell ’18JRN won the James Beard Foundation award for feature writing for her article “Saving the Hogs of Ossabaw Island,” published in Gastro Obscura.
Suffs, a Broadway show about the women’s suffrage movement produced by Jill Furman ’97BUS, won Tony Awards for best book of a musical and best original score. Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, written by Jocelyn Bioh ’08SOA, won for best costume design.
Jargalan Batbayar ’05BC, Bolormaa Enkhbat ’14SIPA, Nominchimeg Odsuren ’15LAW, and former Columbia researcher Saranchuluun Otgon were elected to Mongolia’s parliament.
Anika Collier Navaroli ’13JRN, a writer and lawyer known for blowing the whistle in 2022 on Twitter’s content-moderation policies while working for the company, was featured in the documentary Hacking Hate, about far-right extremism on social media.
Shōgun, a historical TV drama set in 1600s Japan, received 25 Emmy nominations, including one for outstanding drama series (the first Japanese-language show nominated in that category). Executive producer Justin Marks ’02CC co-created and cowrote the series, with Jonathan van Tulleken ’10SOA directing the first two episodes.
Before the End, an installation composed of four tombstone-like figures by sculptor Huma Bhabha ’89SOA, was unveiled in Brooklyn Bridge Park in April and will be on view through March 2025.
Ellen Francis ’16JRN, a journalist at the Washington Post, was named the publication’s Brussels bureau chief after previously serving as a breaking-news reporter in London.
Labor lawyer Joseph R. Landry ’16LAW landed a Supreme Court clerkship under Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson for the term beginning in October 2024.
Several alumni were elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences this year, including a number of faculty members. Non-faculty alumni include Howard University president Ben Vinson III ’98GSAS; journalists Raney Aronson-Rath ’95JRN and Carlos Lozada ’05JRN; translator Mark Polizzotti ’82GSAS; sociologist Prudence Carter ’99GSAS; historian Barbara Ransby ’84GS; and authors Jhumpa Lahiri ’89BC and Tracy K. Smith ’97SOA.
