On Monday, five former Harvard and Radcliffe Institute affiliates and fellows were honored with Pulitzers for their exceptional contributions to journalism and the arts. Their work spans prose on the harrowing realities in Gaza and photographs of the remnants of Syria’s war-torn past, to poetry about walking the dog.
The Pulitzer for explanatory reporting was awarded to Matthieu Aikins of the New York Times, a 2023–24 Radcliffe Fellow, alongside Azam Ahmed and Christina Goldbaum. Their investigation explored the United States’ faltering war in Afghanistan, uncovering the complexities of American support for militias that contributed to civilian displacement and emboldened the Taliban. Aikins, a Canadian American journalist known for his in-depth reporting from conflict zones, had been part of the New York Times’s 2022 Pulitzer for international reporting, for an in-depth examination of civilian deaths resulting from U.S. airstrikes. A companion video from the investigation earned two Emmy Awards.
Mosab Abu Toha, who was a 2019–2020 fellow in Harvard’s Scholars At Risk program and a visiting poet in the department of comparative literature, received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. His essays in The New Yorker offered an intimate portrayal of life in Gaza amidst ongoing conflict, which the Pulitzer committee commended for combining “deep reporting with the intimacy of memoir to convey the Palestinian experience.” Abu Toha, a poet and educator, founded Gaza’s first English-language library. He is the author of Forest of Noise and Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, the latter a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and recipient of an American Book Award.
Alexandra Lange, a 2014 Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, was honored with the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. As a contributing writer for Bloomberg CityLab, Lange examined the design of public spaces and their impact on families. Her work, described by the committee as a “graceful” and “genre-blending” combination of interviews, observations, and analysis, reflects how architecture can foster community. She has written for numerous publications, including The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Harvard Design Magazine, and most recently published a book, Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall (2022).
Moises Saman, a 2023 Nieman Foundation fellow, received the Pulitzer Prize for feature photography for his haunting black-and-white images of Sednaya prison in Syria. Saman is a Spanish-Peruvian photographer and member of Magnum Photos, renowned for his coverage of conflict zones, particularly in the Middle East. His photographs from the Syrian civil war, including from rebel-held areas, have gained international acclaim. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography (2015), the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund Award (2014), and the Henri Nannen Prize (2014), along with multiple World Press Photo awards across more than a decade. His work has also been recognized by Pictures of the Year International, and appears regularly in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, and TIME.
Marie Howe, a 1990 fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection New and Selected Poems. The anthology, spanning more than four decades of her work, reflects on the nuances of everyday life and the small experiences that collectively shape the human condition. She previously served as the New York State Poet Laureate from 2012 to 2016 and has fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Academy of American Poets. Howe teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York City.
