Pulitzer Prizes for Health Reporting

Health care, writ broadly, featured prominently in the Pulitzer Prizes announced yesterday.  I am grateful to the "World Health News" feature of the Harvard School of Public Health for noting these connections:

• PUBLIC SERVICE:
  Los Angeles Times, for "its courageous, exhaustively researched series exposing deadly medical problems and racial injustice at a major public hospital."
• EXPLANATORY REPORTING:
  Gareth Cook of The Boston Globe, for "explaining, with clarity and humanity, the complex scientific and ethical dimensions of stem cell research."
• BEAT REPORTING:
  Amy Dockser Marcus of The Wall Street Journal for "her masterful stories about patients, families and physicians that illuminated the often unseen world of cancer survivors."
• NATIONAL REPORTING:
  Walt Bogdanich of The New York Times, for "his heavily documented stories about the corporate cover-up of responsibility for fatal accidents at railway crossings."
• INTERNATIONAL REPORTING:
  Dele Olojede of Newsday, New York, for his "fresh, haunting look at Rwanda a decade after rape and genocidal slaughter had ravaged the Tutsi tribe."

While I'm at it, I should also offer my congratulations to Poet Laureate Ted Kooser, whose "Delights and Shadows" (Copper Canyon Press) won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry yesterday.  (If you get it, tell me what you think of "Garage Sale." I think it's remarkable.)  This is a modest collection by a poet of immodest talent, the first Poet Laureate from the Great Plains states, and the only P.L. to win the Pulitzer during his tenure as Poet Laureate.  I will be reviewing his "Poetry Home Repair Manual" for the Dallas Morning News later this month.

Update (April 6): Kooser is the third Poet Laureate to win the Pulitzer during his term. The other two Poet Laureates (at the time called the "Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress") were Robert Lowell (in 1947) and Karl Shapiro (1946).   [tm]