April 16, 2012—Graywolf Press is pleased to announce that
Life
on Mars by Tracy K. Smith has been selected as the winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The
winners were announced today by the Pulitzer Prize Board and Columbia
University, and the prizes will be presented to the winners at a luncheon on
May 21st at Columbia University.
Of her win, Tracy K. Smith said, “This news is particularly elating, because I think of the book as a tribute to my father, who passed away in 2008.”
“This is very well deserved,” said Fiona McCrae, director and publisher at Graywolf Press. “Tracy K.
Smith is a poet of great poise and grace that has grown from book to book. All
of us at Graywolf are absolutely delighted about this recognition."
“[The Winter Sun] is full of wondering, noticing and empathetic efforts to weave connections between events and individuals and the cultures they inhabit.”
By Deborah Baker A spellbinding story of renunciation, conversion, and radicalism
"Deborah Baker's astonishing book reads like a detective story but is also a work of enormous beauty and understanding. She has explored the most difficult of subjects in an evocative and original way, powerfully conjuring a bygone, albeit simpler era when an argument between Islam and the West first arose fifty years ago. The Convert is the most brilliant and moving book written about Islam and the West since 9/11."
—Ahmed Rashid, author of Taliban and Descent into Chaos
By Charles Baxter "Beautifully written essays that deftly explore the act of
memoir-making and the art of storytelling. Ranging from tales of trauma
and loss to quotidian and even banal events, they probe the tension
between memory and forgetting and the mysteries of how we do each." —Library Journal