Pulitzer on the Road Podcast: Season One

 

The Pulitzer Prizes has launched the Pulitzer on the Road Podcast. A press release about this new series is available here.

 

Subscribe to the podcast at Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts.

 

The Pulitzer on the Road Podcast features interviews with 2023 winners in Journalism and Books, and explores the stories behind their vital work. Most of these conversations take place 'on the road' where the stories are set.

 

Read more about the six episodes in this podcast season:

 

Episode 6: Meeting Barbara Kingsolver in Appalachia

 

For this episode, we travel to Appalachia for a conversation with 2023 Fiction winner Barbara Kingsolver. Kingsolver’s sweeping tale Demon Copperhead won the 2023 Fiction Prize. An earlier novel, The Poisonwood Bible, was a 1999 finalist for the Fiction Prize. Appalachia is at the heart of Demon Copperhead, but also at the heart of Kingsolver’s life. We meet with Kingsolver on the farm where she lives with her family and their animals, buzzing bees and clucking chickens providing the backdrop for a conversation with Pulitzer Board member Emily Ramshaw, chief executive of nonprofit news site The 19th.

 

Episode 5: Journalist Caitlin Dickerson on Taking Children at the Border

 

Caitlin Dickerson won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting, but her 30,000 word piece for The Atlantic on family separations at the border is also a masterclass in investigative reporting. In this episode, Dickerson travels to El Paso, Texas, to meet with Pulitzer Board member Ginger Thompson, who has also written extensively on the border in her role as Chief of Correspondents at ProPublica. 

 

Episode 4: Authors Hernan Diaz and Viet Thanh Nguyen in Conversation

 

What can a novel about wealth in America tell us about America? In this podcast episode, 2023 Fiction winner Hernan Diaz is in conversation with Pulitzer Board member and 2016 Fiction winner Viet Thanh Nguyen in New York City. Together, the authors discuss Diaz’s Trust and In the Distance (a Fiction finalist in 2018), as well as Nguyen’s The Sympathizer

 

Episode 3: Historian Jefferson Cowie on Freedom to Dominate in Alabama

 

On Election Day in November 1874 in Eufaula, Alabama, whites shot at Black voters, killing and injuring many people while leaving others to run for their lives. The impact of this massacre? As 2023 History winner Jefferson Cowie explains, it “brought about the collapse of Black voting in Barbour County.” In this episode, Cowie is back in Eufaula to talk about his prize-winning book, Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power with Pulitzer Board member Kelly Lytle Hernández, a professor of history, African American studies & urban studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. 

 

Episode 2: Journalist Mstyslav Chernov on being Trapped in Mariupol

 

Mstyslav Chernov and two other Associated Press journalists arrived in Mariupol hours before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, becoming the only international journalists to remain in the city during its siege. Chernov and his colleagues’ coverage won The Associated Press the 2023 Public Service Prize. Chernov is in conversation with Pulitzer Board member Nancy Barnes of The Boston Globe the day after Chernov picked up a DuPont award for his AP/PBS Frontline film, “20 Days in Mariupol,“ which went on to win the 2024 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature

 

Episode 1: Journalists John Archibald and Ashley Remkus on a Small Town Shakedown in Alabama

 

In the first episode of the Pulitzer on the Road Podcast, we head to Brookside, Alabama, where 2023 Local Reporting winners John Archibald and Ashley Remkus revisit their reporting about police corruption in this small municipality. They’re joined by Pulitzer Board Co-Chair Neil Brown of the Poynter Institute.


The Pulitzer on the Road Podcast is a production of the Pulitzer Prize Board at Columbia University, in collaboration with the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, and produced by Central Sound at Arizona PBS. The producers are Anna Williams and Alex Kosiorek from Arizona PBS, and Nicole Carroll. Pulitzer Administrator Marjorie Miller is the executive producer.

Season