Two Yaddo Artists Win Pulitzers

New York, NY (April 19, 2011) – Two Yaddo artists – author Jennifer Egan and composer Zhou Long – have won 2011 Pulitzer Prizes, it was announced Monday at Columbia University in New York City.

Egan won the fiction prize for A Visit from the Goon Squad, a national best-selling novel the Pulitzer panel called “an inventive investigation of growing up and growing old in the digital age” and lauded for its “big-hearted curiosity about cultural change at warp speed.” Egan, who will read from the winning book at Yaddo’s May 24^th New York City Benefit, is a novelist, short story writer, and journalist who lives in Brooklyn, New York. A Visit from the Goon Squad also won the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award.

Zhou was honored for his opera Madame White Snake, which was cited by the Pulitzer judges as “a deeply expressive opera that draws on a Chinese folk tale to blend the musical traditions of the East and the West.” The opera premiered in February, 2010 at Opera Boston. A visiting professor of composition at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory of Music and Dance, Zhou is married to fellow Yaddo composer Chen Yi.

Two other Yaddo writers were nominated as finalists for this year’s Pulitzers:  Jonathan Dee was a finalist in fiction for his novel The Privileges, a wide-ranging tale about an elite Manhattan family, moral bankruptcy, and the long reach of wealth; and Jean Valentine was a 2011 finalist in poetry for Break the Glass, a collection of imaginative poems acclaimed for small details that often surprise readers.

The awards, which include a $10,000 cash prize, will be formally presented at a luncheon in late May at Low Library on theColumbiaUniversitycampus.

Yaddo artists have won a total of 66 Pulitzer Prizes. To view the entire list of Yaddo Pulitzer winners, click here.