Two alumni win Pulitzers

Brown grads take fiction and drama prizes

by Zachary Block

Two Brown alumni were among the seven Arts & Letters Pulitzer Prize winners announced on April 7. Jeffrey Eugenides '82 won in the fiction category for his second novel, “Middlesex,” published last year by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. A native of Detroit, Eugenides has published fiction in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, the Yale Review, Best American Short Stories, the Gettysburg Review, and Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. His first novel, “The Virgin Suicides,” was published in 1993, has been translated into fifteen languages, and was made into a feature film.

Winning the drama Pulitzer was Nilo Cruz '94 M.F.A. for his play “Anna in the Tropics.” Among Cruz's other plays are “Night Train to Bolina,” “Dancing on her Knees,” “A Park in Our House,” “Two Sisters and a Piano,” “Hortensia and the Museum of Dreams,” and “Beauty of the Father.” Cruz’s play, “Lorca in a Green Dress,” will premier on July 12 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon.

(The Brown Alumni Magazine has a review of “Middlesex” and of Cruz’s play “A Bicycle Country.”)