Kansas
One author from Kansas wins a Pulitzer Prize Monday, and a second is named a finalist
Two writers from Kansas earned some of the highest honors in their fields Monday when they were recognized by the Pulitzer Prize judges.
Anne Boyer, a Kansas City Art Institute creative writing instructor and a breast cancer survivor, won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for her 2019 book “The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care.”
The judges called the book an “elegant and unforgettable narrative about the brutality of illness and the capitalism of cancer care in America.”
Author Ben Lerner was named a finalist for the fiction award for his novel “The Topeka School.”
Judges said the book was a “brilliant and ambitious exploration of language, family and American identity as exemplified by the life of a Midwestern high school debate champion.”
Both Boyer and Lerner are originally from Topeka.
Boyer in 2018 was one of 10 emerging writers to receive a $50,000 award from the Whiting Foundation “based on the criteria of early-career achievement and the promise of superior literary work to come.”
She also won a $40,000 grant as the inaugural recipient of the Cy Twombly Award for Poetry.
Both awards were largely the result of her 2015 collection “Garments Against Women,” described by one critic as “deeply, quietly, savagely perverse.” Publisher’s Weekly declared that “Boyer attempts to abandon literature in the same moments that she forms it.”
After spending part of her early life in Salina, Boyer attended the University of Kansas, Kansas State, Wichita State, and at times worked as a legal secretary and a tutor for homeless children and foster care children.
She first made a name for herself with written works such as “The Romance of Happy Workers,” “A Form of Sabotage,” “Anne Boyer’s Good Apocalypse,” “Art is War,” “The 2000s” and “My Common Heart.”
The latter was published in 2011, the same year Boyer was invited to join the faculty of KCAI.
Lerner graduated from Topeka High School, which also features in his novel. He has written two other novels —“Leaving the Atocha Station” and “10:04” — and is the author of three books of poetry: “The Lichtenberg Figures,” “Angle of Yaw” and “Mean Free Path.”
He has received fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur foundations.
Lerner teaches creative writing at Brooklyn College in New York.
In the journalism awards, The Kansas City Star’s Melinda Henneberger was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. It was the second year in a row she was a finalist, and the third year in a row The Star produced a finalist.
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