Alabama produces three Pulitzer Prizes, including two by a news outlet that's now online-only, and a book of history

The winner of the Fiction prize,
Appalachia's first since 1958

Two online-only publications covering Alabama and Mississippi, including the states' rural areas, were among Monday's winners of Pulitzer Prizes in journalism. In prizes for books, one on a rural Alabama county won the prize for History, and the Fiction prize went to Barbara Kingsolver's latest book based in rural Appalachia.

The top Pulitzer, for Public Service, went to The Associated Press for its coverage of the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol, and the finalists were the Austin American Statesman for its coverage of the school massacre in Uvalde, Texas, and The Washington Post for its investigation of the fentanyl crisis. Perhaps indicating how close the Austin paper came to winning, the Uvalde shooting was mentioned among major news events in the script introducing the announcement of the prizes. 

The prize for Local Reporting was shared by two online-only publications: Mississippi Today, for Anna Wolfe's investigation that revealed how a governor steered millions of  "welfare dollars to benefit his family and friends, including NFL quarterback Brett Favre," and AL.com, for the series by John Archibald, Ashley Remkus, Ramsey Archibald (John's son) and Challen Stephens that revealed "how the police force in the town of Brookside preyed on residents to inflate revenue, coverage that prompted the resignation of the police chief, four new laws and a state audit," the announcement says.

AL.com is owned by the Newhouse family's Advance Publications, which stopped printing its newspapers in Birmigham, Mobile and Huntsville this year. It won another Pulitzer, for Commentary, Kyle Whitmire's  "measured and persuasive columns that document how Alabama's Confederate heritage still colors the present with racism and exclusion, told through tours of its first capital, its mansions and monuments – and through the history that has been omitted."

Barbour County (Wikipedia)

A book about a southeast Alabama county, Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power, by Jefferson Cowie of Vanderbilt University, won the History prize. The announcement said Barbour County, where George C. Wallace was born and raised, was "shaped by settler colonialism and slavery," and the book "illustrates the evolution of white supremacy by drawing powerful connections between anti-government and racist ideologies."

The Fiction prize was shared by Kingsolver for Demon Copperhead, "a masterful recasting of David Copperfield, narrated by an Appalachian boy whose wise, unwavering voice relates his encounters with poverty, addiction, institutional failures and moral collapse–and his efforts to conquer them," and Hernan Diaz for Trust, "a riveting novel set in a bygone America that explores family, wealth and ambition through linked narratives rendered in different literary styles, a complex examination of love and power in a country where capitalism is king." Kingsolver lives in southwest Virginia and grew up in Kentucky; her Fiction prize was the first to go to an Appalachian writer since James Agee of Knoxville won it for A Death in the Family in 1958, reports Lilly Knoepp of Blue Ridge Public Radio.

Race and ethnicity figured in other rural-oriented prizes. The Audio Reporting prize went to the staff of Gimlet Media, "notably Connie Walker, whose investigation into her father’s troubled past revealed a larger story of abuse of hundreds of Indigenous children at an Indian residential school in Canada, including other members of Walker’s extended family, a personal search for answers expertly blended with rigorous investigative reporting."

African American banjo and fiddle player Rhiannon Giddens, a native of North Carolina, and Michael Abels won the Music prize for "Omar," an opera "about enslaved people brought to North America from Muslim countries," the announcement says, adding that the work "respectfully represents African as well as African American traditions, expanding the language of the operatic form while conveying the humanity of those condemned to bondage." For the full list of prizes, click here.