Diane Seuss, Joshua Cohen, Andrea Elliott among Pulitzer Prize winners in books

The finalists and winners of the 106th Pulitzer Prizes in 22 categories across journalism and the arts were announced Monday afternoon via livestream. Among them were the authors of books in five categories — fiction, history, biography, poetry and general nonfiction.

Prize-winning authors included two recent winners of Los Angeles Times Book Prizes: Diane Seuss (in poetry) for "frank: sonnets," cited by the Pulitzer committee as “a virtuosic collection that inventively expands the sonnet form to confront the messy contradictions of contemporary America”; and Ada Ferrer (in history) for "Cuba: An American History," a sweeping chronicle of the island nation and its complex relationship with the United States. The committee described "Cuba" as "original and compelling ... spanning five centuries, of the island that became an obsession for many presidents and policy makers. "

Nicole Eustace was also awarded a prize in history for "Covered With Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America,” a “gripping account of Indigenous justice ... and how the aftermath of a settler's murder led to the oldest continuously recognized treaty in the United States." Eustace's chronicle was also a 2021 National Book Award finalist.

Novelist Joshua Cohen won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for "The Netanyahus," "a mordant, linguistically deft historical novel about the ambiguities of the Jewish-American experience," according to the committee. The novel also won the 2021 National Jewish Book Award.

Andrea Elliott won in the category of nonfiction for "Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City," which follows a girl coming of age amid New York City's homelessness crisis and expands on a 2013 feature for the New York Times. Elliott's book has already won the Gotham Prize for outstanding work about New York City.

The winners in biography were Winfred Rembert and Erin I. Kelly for "Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South." The committee called the book a "searing first-person illustrated account of an artist’s life during the 1950s and 1960s in an unreconstructed corner of the Deep South — an account of abuse, endurance, imagination and aesthetic transformation." Rembert, who survived a lynching and brutal imprisonment before making groundbreaking art in unorthodox media, died in 2021 at age 75.

See the complete list of finalists below.

Fiction

"The Netanyahus," Joshua Cohen

"Monkey Boy," Francisco Goldman

"Palmares," Gayle Jones

History

"Covered with Night," Nicole Eustace

"Cuba: An American History," Ada Ferrer

"Until Justice Be Done," Kate Masur

Biography

"The Doctors Blackwell," Janice P. Nimura

"Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South," the late Winfred Rembert as told to Erin I. Kelly

"Pessoa," Richard Zenith

Poetry

"frank: sonnets," Diane Seuss

"Yellow Rain," Mai Der Vang

"Refractive Africa: Ballet of the Forgotten," Will Alexander

General Nonfiction

"Invisible Child," Andrea Elliott

"Home, Land, Security," Carla Power

"The Family Roe," Joshua Prager

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.