Archibald, Chua, Trethewey join Pulitzer Board

Journalists John Archibald of Alabama’s AL.com, Gina Chua of the global news site Semafor, and poet Natasha Trethewey have been elected to the Pulitzer Prize Board, Columbia University announced today.

The three new Board members are widely honored leaders in their fields with decades of experience in journalism and arts and letters.

“We are fortunate to add this wealth of talent to the Pulitzer Board,” said Co-Chairs Elizabeth Alexander, president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Emily Ramshaw, co-founder and chief executive officer of The 19th digital news site.

“John and Gina bring a remarkable depth of experience in traditional and new journalism organizations in an evolving media landscape. And Natasha is one of the most decorated and recognized American poets of our generation,” they said.
 
Archibald, a two-time Pulitzer winner, is a reporter and columnist at AL.com, and an award-winning podcaster. Archibald won the Pulitzer for Commentary in 2018 for his “lyrical and courageous” columns. He also was the lead reporter on AL.com’s 2023 Local Reporting Prize-winning investigation of out-of-control policing in the tiny Alabama town of Brookside.

In 2021, Archibald wrote and co-hosted the national Murrow Award-winning podcast “Unjustifiable,” the story of a Black woman killed by Birmingham police in 1979. He is the author of “Shaking the Gates of Hell: A Search for Family” and “Truth in the Wake of the Civil Rights Revolution,” one of NPR’s favorite books of 2021. He was a Nieman fellow at Harvard University in 2020-2021 and the inaugural writer in residence at Boston University in 2023. 

“I love what the Pulitzers stand for, what they mean to journalists trying to do good work in a hard world. They don’t just recognize excellence, they inspire it,” Archibald said. “I’m also in awe of the remarkable people on this Board. I shake myself from time to time to make sure this really is my life.”

Chua is executive editor and a member of the founding team of the global news startup Semafor. 

Prior to joining Semafor, she was executive editor at Reuters, where she previously managed the graphics department, helped build a world-class data and computational journalism team, and oversaw the creation of the ground-breaking Connected China app, which tracked power and relationships among China’s elite. She drove development of Tracer, a machine-learning system that algorithmically detected and verified newsworthy events on X, previously called Twitter.
 
Before her time at Reuters, Chua was editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post and The Asian Wall Street Journal/Wall Street Journal Asia in Hong Kong; a deputy managing editor at The Wall Street Journal in New York; a foreign correspondent in Singapore, Manila and Hanoi; and a television and radio journalist in Singapore. She transitioned in late 2020.

“I’m incredibly honored to be invited to be a part of this distinguished group and important institution,” Chua said. “At a time of growing misinformation and distrust of facts, organizations like The Pulitzer Prizes play a key role in recognizing and celebrating the value of rigorous, fact-based reporting and analysis.”

Trethewey served two terms as the 19th poet laureate of the United States (2012-2014). She is the author of five collections of poetry, including “Native Guard” (2006) — for which she was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize — and, most recently, “Monument: Poems New and Selected” (2018); a book of nonfiction, “Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast” (2010); a memoir, “Memorial Drive” (2020), an instant New York Times Bestseller; and “The House of Being” (2024), a meditation on writing. 

She is the recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Philosophical Society. In 2017 she received the Heinz Award for Arts and Humanities. 

A chancellor of the Academy of American Poets since 2019, Trethewey was awarded the 2020 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt Prize in Poetry for Lifetime Achievement from the Library of Congress. In 2022 she was the William B. Hart Poet in Residence at the American Academy in Rome. Currently, she is Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University.

“I am honored to join the esteemed members of the Pulitzer Board,” Trethewey said. “I look forward to participating in the great tradition of celebrating American excellence in journalism, the arts, and letters — some of our most enduring cultural productions, the many ways we articulate the stories that matter, that give meaning and shape to our lives.”

About The Pulitzer Prizes:

The Pulitzer Prizes, which are administered at Columbia University, were established by Joseph Pulitzer, a Hungarian-American journalist and newspaper publisher, who left money to Columbia University upon his death in 1911. A portion of his bequest was used to found the School of Journalism in 1912 and establish the Pulitzer Prizes, which were first awarded in 1917.

The 19-member board is composed mainly of leading journalists or news executives from media outlets across the U.S., as well as five academics or persons in the arts. The dean of Columbia's journalism school and the administrator of the prizes are non-voting members. The chair rotates to the most senior member or members. The board is self-perpetuating in the election of members. Voting members may serve three terms of three years for a total of nine years.