Eliza Griswold Wins Pulitzer Prize

Just two weeks after Eliza Griswold gave a reading at Loyola for the Writing Department’s Modern Masters Reading Series, her latest book was awarded the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction. Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, explores the struggles an Appalachian family experiences in the wake of corporate fracking. The mother of the family, Stacey Haney, is alarmed by a mysterious illness her children are suffering. After joining allies within her own community, she begins to seek justice from a corporation of outsiders. In a review of the book for The New York Times, Jennifer Szalai writes: “What Griswold depicts is a community, like the earth, cracked open.”

During her time as an undergrad at Princeton University, Eliza Griswold was the thesis advisee of Karen Fish, the current Chair of the Writing Department. Griswold then went on complete graduate work at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars as well as Columbia University.

Eliza Griswold is the author of The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam, a book of nonfiction that was awarded the J. Anthony Lukas Prize and became a New York Times bestseller. Griswold has also published a collection of poems titled Wideawake Field. Her journalism and poetry have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Nation, Slate, the New York Times Magazine, Granta, and the Paris Review.

Learn more about the Modern Masters Reading Series and see who is coming to Loyola next.