Two Women Academics Awarded Pulitzer Prizes

Each year, the Pulitzer Prize Board awards a number of prizes in journalism and the arts. This year two women academics were among the winners.

Caroline Shaw, a doctoral student in composition in the department of music at Princeton University won the Pulitzer Prize in music. She was honored for her composition “Parita for 8 Voices.” The board called the composition “a highly polished and inventive a cappalla work uniquely embracing speech, whispers, sighs, murmurs, wordless melodies, and novel vocal effects.”

Shaw is a member of the vocal quarter, Roomful of Teeth, for which she wrote “Parita for 8 Voices.” The work was included on the group’s album released last October by New Amsterdam Records.

Shaw is also a violinist and has been a musician since the age of 2. She is a graduate of Rice University and holds a master’s degree in music from Yale University.

Sharon Olds, an associate professor of English and acting director of the graduate program in creative writing at New York University, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. She was honored for her collection Stag’s Leap (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012) which included poems about her feelings as she went through a recent divorce.

Dr. Olds has published several earlier collections of poetry, including The Dead and the Living (Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), which won her the National Book Critics Circle Award.

A native of San Francisco, Dr. Olds graduated from Stanford University and earned a Ph.D. at Columbia University.