May 4th, 2026 — Civitella celebrates Patricia Smith (CRF 2017), a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems (Scribner); and M. Gessen (CRF 2019), winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Opinion Writing.
Patricia Smith Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Poetry
Patricia was praised by the jury for her “bold re-imagining of the ‘new and selected’ form where the poet enters into dialogue with her earlier poems, transforming a career retrospective into an engagement with earlier selves. The Intentions of Thunder gathers, for the first time, the essential work from across Patricia Smith’s decorated career. Here, Smith’s poems, affixed with her remarkable gift of insight, present a rapturous ode to life. With careful yet vaulting movement, these poems traverse the redeeming landscape of pain, confront the frightening revelations of history, and disclose the joyous possibilities of the future. The result is a profound testament to the necessity of poetry—all the careful witness, embodied experience, and bristling pleasure that it bestows.”
Patricia is an inductee of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement. She is the author of nine acclaimed books of poetry, including Incendiary Art, finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize. A Guggenheim Fellow, a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, Patricia is a creative writing professor in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University and a former distinguished professor at the City University of New York.
Patricia’s win follows Marie Howe’s in 2025 in the same category for New and Selected Poems (W. W. Norton & Company). Learn more about The Intentions of Thunder at simonandschuster.com.
M. Gessen Pulitzer Prize Winner in Opinion Writing
The Pulitzer Prize in Opinion Writing is “for distinguished editorials, columns or other written commentary, augmented by any available journalistic tool, containing well-reasoned and compelling arguments on topics of public interest, whether originally researched and reported, or informed by personal experience. The test of excellence is clarity, moral purpose, sound logic, engaging prose, and power to influence public opinion, Fifteen thousand dollars ($15,000).”
M., an Opinion columnist for the New York Times, was praised by the jury “for an illuminating collection of reported essays on rising authoritarian regimes that draw on history and personal experience to probe timely themes of oppression, belonging and exile.”
M. won a George Polk Award for opinion writing in 2024. They are the author of 11 books, including “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” which won the National Book Award in 2017. They were born in the Soviet Union, moved to the U.S. as a teenager, and returned in 1981 to spend years studying and reporting on Vladimir Putin. They were active in gay and trans rights groups. They moved back to the U.S. in 2013; in 2024 they were convicted in absentia in Russia, accused of spreading “false information” about the Ukraine war, and they were sentenced to eight years in prison. M. has taught at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, Bard College and Amherst College.
Explore their winning work at pulitzer.org.