The Pulitzer Prize has been awarded by Columbia University since 1917. The awards are given on the recommendations of a board of jurors for Journalism, Letters, Music and Drama. The awards for Letters include Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Biography or Autobiography, and History.

2008

Failure: Poems by Philip Schultz

Review
"Life goes on for Schultz, and he continues to write about it with greater conversational sweetness than any other American poet one can readily call to mind." Booklist (read more)

2007

Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey

Synopsis
Through elegiac verse that honors her mother and tells of her own fraught childhood, Natasha Trethewey confronts the racial legacy of her native Deep South — where one of the first black regiments, the Louisiana Native Guards, was called into service during the Civil War. Trethewey's resonant and beguiling collection is a haunting conversation between personal experience and national history. (read more)

2006

Late Wife: Poems by Claudia Emerson

Review
"Claudia Emerson's Late Wife tells the story of love lost and redeemed. Her poetry explores the way we attach meaning to things without us and connect them with our inner lives. In her hands heartbreak and healing turn as tangible as the material world she observes with such love and such precision." Mark Jarman (read more)

2005

Delights & Shadows by Ted Kooser

Review
"Kooser documents the dignities, habits and small griefs of daily life, our hunger for connection, our struggle to find balance." Poetry (read more)

2004

Walking to Martha's Vineyard by Franz Wright

Review
"Terse and consistent, Wright's 15th book...returns to the haunted territory of The Beforelife with a wider range of formal tools. Heartfelt but often cryptic poems....His best work may be his least typical." Publishers Weekly (read more)

2003

Moy Sand and Gravel by Paul Muldoon

Publisher Comments
Paul Muldoon's ninth collection of poems, his first since Hay (1998), finds him working a rich vein that extends from the rivery, apple-heavy County Armagh of the 1950s, in which he was brought up, to suburban New Jersey, on the banks of a canal dug by Irish navvies, where he now lives. (read more)

2002

Practical Gods by Carl Dennis

Publisher Comments
Practical Gods is the eighth collection by Carl Dennis, a critically acclaimed poet and recent winner of one of the most prestigious poetry awards, the Ruth Lilly Prize. Carl Dennis has won acclaim for "wise, original, and often deeply moving" poems that "ease the reader out of accustomed modes of seeing and perceiving" (New York Times). (read more)

2001 Different Hours: Poems by Stephen Dunn