Pulitzer Prize

Alice C. Steinbach, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for The Baltimore Sun, whose work captured the wonder and grace of people and places around the world, died Tuesday of cancer at her Roland Park Place home. She was 78. In her more than two-decade career with The Baltimore Sun, Ms. Steinbach took readers into close communion with her detailed profiles of the rich and famous from the world of entertainment, literature, politics, society and the arts. In a later career as a travel writer, her work took readers on strolls through places like the colorful back streets of Paris' Left Bank or, as she wrote, "the impossibly crowded Uffizi art gallery" in Florence.

The 2013 Pulitzer Prizes were announced today, and among the winners is "Devil in the Grove," a non-fiction account of Baltimore native Thurgood Marshall's fearless work for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in a Florida case. As we all know, Marshall went on to bring the nation's landmark school integration case, Brown vs. Board of Education, and later became a U.S. Supreme Court justice. The winners: FICTION -- "The Orphan Master's Son" by Adam Johnson, DRAMA -- "Disgraced" by Ayad Akhtar, HISTORY -- "Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam" by Fredrik Logeval l (Random House)

Kevin Puts, a composer who teaches at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, won the Pulitzer Prize in music Monday for his first opera. Puts, a member of the Peabody faculty since 2006, was honored for "Silent Night," a two-act work commissioned by the Minnesota Opera. "I'm still in a state of shock, and I'm trying to get my bearings," the composer said from Minneapolis, where "Silent Night" premiered in November. "It is an enormous thrill. " The opera was inspired by the 2005 film "Joyeux Noel," about the unofficial cease-fire that emerged spontaneously during Christmas 1914, when British, French and German troops socialized during a brief respite before the trench warfare resumed.

Richard Ben Cramer, a former Baltimore Sun reporter who later became a Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for The Philadelphia Inquirer and an acclaimed author chronicling the lives of politicians and legendary sports figures, died Monday of lung cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Mr. Cramer, who was 62, lived in Chestertown. "Richard's work as a gifted writer and deeply principled journalist made our Republic a better place; made us a stronger, more compassionate, and more understanding people," Gov. Martin J. O'Malley, a friend, said in a statement released Tuesday.

A NEW WORD entered the vocabulary of many Sun readers with the publication last year of a series of articles detailing the shameful practices within the "shipbreaking" industry.The Sun stories looked at the unsafe work conditions and pollution in the Port of Baltimore, in other U.S. port cities and in Third World countries brought about by shady operators of companies that break up old ships, many of them once-proud members of the U.S. Navy's fleet. It forced the federal government to re-examine its collusion in shipbreaking activities.

Acclaimed author Edward P. Jones will appear in Baltimore on Saturday, April 17, to headline the first-ever CityLit Festival. Jones' novel The Known World was just awarded the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. (It was also a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award.) The festival will feature free workshops, exhibits and appearances by local authors and poets, including Tonya Matthews, Reggie Harris Sun reporter M. Dion Thompson and his former colleague Laura Lippman.

Moneta J. Sleet Jr., who picked up a box camera while attending segregated schools in Kentucky and went on to become the first black to win journalism's top prize, for documenting the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr., died of cancer Monday in New York City. He was 70.In 1969, he won a Pulitzer Prize for feature photography after capturing the forlorn image of a veiled Coretta Scott King cradling her 5-year-old daughter on a crowded church pew.Although he spent the bulk of his career documenting America's slow march toward racial equality, he was almost denied the chance to take the photograph.

LAST FALL, an argument between Orioles second-baseman Roberto Alomar and umpire John Hirschbeck ended with the player spitting on the umpire -- an outrage that almost led the umpires to boycott baseball's play-offs.After a suspension for the first five days of the season, the Baltimore Orioles star resumed play yesterday just as it was announced that Lisa Pollak, a feature writer for The Sun, won a Pulitzer Prize for her story about the umpire's sons and their battles with a deadly disease.

This Tuesday, at 3 p.m. at Columbia University, the annual Pulitzer Prizes will be announced. For a couple of dozen people all around America, there will occur a moment of singular ecstasy.There are 14 prizes in individual categories of journalism, including a gold medal for public service by a newspaper. There are also prizes for fiction, history, poetry, biography or autobiography, general non-fiction, drama and music.There are more than a dozen other national prizes in journalism, and hundreds of local ones, but none is remotely as coveted or as honored as the Pulitzers.

NEW YORK -- Publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux had a good day yesterday, winning two awards in the Pulitzer Prize arts categories: in fiction for "The Hours," a novel by Michael Cunningham, and non-fiction for "Annals of the Former World" by John McPhee."

Junot - and Yunior - are back. Junot Diaz is the MacArthur Fellowship-winning writer whose work reflects his Dominican roots and his Jersey youth, and who has dazzled critics and audiences with a virtuosic narrative voice that weaves tales of young men similar to the ones he grew up with. Yunior is one of Diaz's most indelible characters - brilliant, posturing, alienated, self-destructive and, for better or worse, unable to fully inhabit his own mask. Readers previously met Yunior in the 2006 short-story collection "Drown" and in the novel "The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize.

1931 - Edmund Duffy, for his editorial cartoon, "An Old Struggle Still Going On" 1934 - Edmund Duffy, for his editorial cartoon, " California With Pride" 1937 - John W. Owens, for the body of his work in editorial cartooning 1940 - Edmund Duffy, for his editorial cartoon, "The Outstretched Hand" 1944 - Dewey Fleming, for distinguished national reporting 1945 - Mark Watson, for international reporting from London and the war fronts in...

The 2012 Pulitzer Prizes award today had a big gap -- there was no winner in the fiction category, which must have ticked off a whole lot of marketing execs. What will they do with all the "Winner of the Pulitzer Prize" stickers they had printed up for their covers? The finalists were not a shoddy bunch: "Train Dreams" by Denis Johnson, "Swamplandia!" by Karen Russell and "The Pale King," by the late David Foster Wallace.  Other highly acclaimed novels of 2011 would have been worthy winners, too. Among them: "The Art of Fielding" by Chad Harbach and "The Tiger's Wife" by Téa Obreht.

Kevin Puts, a composer who teaches at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, won the Pulitzer Prize in music Monday for his first opera. Puts, a member of the Peabody faculty since 2006, was honored for "Silent Night," a two-act work commissioned by the Minnesota Opera. "I'm still in a state of shock, and I'm trying to get my bearings," the composer said from Minneapolis, where "Silent Night" premiered in November. "It is an enormous thrill. " The opera was inspired by the 2005 film "Joyeux Noel," about the unofficial cease-fire that emerged spontaneously during Christmas 1914, when British, French and German troops socialized during a brief respite before the trench warfare resumed.

Former Oriole Roberto Alomar will find out today whether his stellar career as one of the best second basemen in the history of baseball will outweigh one ugly moment in 1996 that has scarred his reputation ever since. Alomar's name appeared on the Hall of Fame ballot for the first time this past November, and he is considered the strongest candidate to gain induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame when the results of the balloting are announced by the Hall and the Baseball Writers' Association of America.

JACK NELSON, 80 Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Jack Nelson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who covered the civil rights movement and the Watergate scandal for the Los Angeles Times and was the paper's Washington bureau chief for 20 years, died Wednesday. Mr. Nelson, who had pancreatic cancer, died at his home in Bethesda, said Richard Cooper, a family friend and longtime Times associate. Mr. Nelson spent more than 35 years with the Los Angeles Times, stepping down as its chief Washington correspondent in 2001.

The Baltimore Sun's management and staff congratulate feature writer Lisa Pollak on winning the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing.While the nation focused on an ugly incident, Lisa saw a story no one else was telling: What was it like to be John Hirschbeck ` to survive the death of one son and to wake up every day knowing that another son suffered from the same disease.Lisa's story in The Sun went beyond the event being covered by every other newspaper in America. Only hers revealed the human drama behind the story.

William K. Marimow, managing editor of The Sun and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, was promoted yesterday to editor and senior vice president, the newspaper's top editorial position. Marimow, 52, replaces John S. Carroll, who became the top editor of the Los Angeles Times yesterday after nine years in the post at The Sun. Michael E. Waller, publisher of The Sun, announced the appointment to newsroom employees yesterday afternoon. He later said the decision to promote Marimow was made quickly, easily and without considering candidates from outside the company.