Three people awarded Pulitzer Prizes on Monday are academics. Columbia University’s Eric Foner won the history prize for his The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. Siddhartha Mukherjee, an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia, got the prize for general nonfiction for The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan won the poetry prize for The Best of It: New and Selected Poems. Ryan teaches English at the College of Marin, a community college in California. Ryan also attended a community college; she earned an Associate degree from Antelope Valley Junior College in the 1960s before she transferred to UCLA.