Pulitzer Prize

4Kids: Featured site of the month PET MUMMIES OF ANCIENT EGYPT If you have a pet, you understand just how much people can love their animals. The ancient Egyptians were no different. In fact, they often mummified their pets and were buried with them. Grab a mouse and dig deep to find out all the amazing facts about animal mummification at www.animalmummies.com. The Animal Mummy Project at the Cairo Museum Web site is dedicated to preserving these 3,000-year-old artifacts. You can also learn about foods that were entombed with the dearly departed.

In Maryland Three N.Y. men convicted in scheme to smuggle liquor A federal jury convicted three New York men yesterday in a liquor-smuggling scheme that investigators said stretched from Maryland to Canada and cost the Canadian government nearly $6 million. David B. Pasquantino, 54, and Carl J. Pasquantino, 53, brothers from Niagara Falls, N.Y., were convicted on six counts each of wire fraud by jurors in U.S. District Court in Baltimore. Arthur "Butch" Hilts, 42, of Sanborn, N.Y., was convicted on one count of wire fraud.

AN EARLY poem by Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000), the first black person to win the Pulitzer Prize, describes the funeral rites for a woman who might have been a poet: "But it [the casket] can't hold her. She rises in the sunshine. There she goes, Back to the bars she knew and the repose In love-rooms and the things in people's eyes, Too vital and too squeaking." Brooks died of cancer Dec. 3 at her home in Chicago. She, too, loved the things in people's eyes. The 83-year-old poet, according to reports, took her last breath surrounded by family and friends who read her poems to her. If there is a poetic way to die, this was certainly one. It was also a proper way for a poet whose poetry was nurtured by her family.

More than 25 years ago, a group of women sat around a kitchen table in Columbia trying to figure out how they could meet writers they admired. None of them envisioned the day when Nobel laureates and Pulitzer Prize winners would come to their programs and a National Book Award winner would sit on their board. Since 1974, the Howard County Poetry and Literature Society has emerged as a powerhouse in regional literary circles. Better known as HoCoPoLitSo, the organization has brought dozens of high-profile authors and poets to the area while working to further the joys of literature.

John Hohenberg, 94, former journalism professor, author and Pulitzer Prize administrator, died Aug. 6 in Knoxville, Tenn. A New York City native, he worked as a reporter, editor, foreign correspondent and Washington correspondent for several New York newspapers and United Press before becoming a journalism teacher at Columbia University, his alma mater, in 1948. He taught in the graduate journalism program at Columbia for 26 years, winning the Society of Professional Journalists' distinguished teaching award in 1974.

As a child, Maxine Kumin memorized lines, stanzas, poems written by her favorite poets. As a professor, she demanded that her graduate students memorize 30 lines of verse each week during the semester. "I'm doing you a favor," she'd answer when they protested. "I'm giving you an internal library to draw on when you are taken political prisoner." Much later, as she lay captive, immobilized not by politics but by a spinal cord injury, she remembered her joking remark as she turned to her own internal storehouse of poetry for strength and solace.

Karl Shapiro, the Baltimore-born Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who burst on the literary scene during World War II, died of cardiac arrest Sunday at the Jewish Home for the Aged in Manhattan. He was 86. Named Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress in 1947, he won a number of top poetry awards as a young man, including the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for "V Letter and Other Poems," which had been published the year before, while he was an Army medic in New Guinea. His early themes were drawn from the technological world, racial prejudice, anti-Semitism, industrial blight, bigotry and the impersonality of death by machine.

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.

PULITZER time always quickens the blood in American newsrooms. Any reporter who says he doesn't want to win one is on a different moral plane than most. And, with some important exceptions, the fever to win what is sometimes called the PP or the Big P -- meaning Pulitzer Prize -- is a healthy thing. If a paper has contenders in the annual contest, it probably has a healthy quotient of teamwork, a clear mission, talented people at every level of the operation and some good opportunities to serve its community.

A $15,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts will help the Howard County Poetry and Literature Society kick off its 26th year of bringing nationally recognized writers to county audiences.Since November 1974, the group has invited literary guests to the area for public readings and workshops. In the past year and a half, a previous NEA grant helped fund events with writers including Amiri Baraka, Irish writer Colm Toibin, four past Maryland poet laureates and Pulitzer Prize winner Rita Dove.