Medar de la Cruz, a Dominican-American cartoonist and illustrator born in Miami, Florida, and currently residing in Brooklyn, New York was awarded the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Illustrated Reporting and Commentary. The award comes with a US$15,000 cash prize.
De la Cruz won the award for his contribution to The New Yorker magazine. The award is given “for his visually-driven story set inside Rikers Island jail using bold black-and-white images that humanize the prisoners and staff through their hunger for books.
The winning work, The Diary of a Rikers Island Library Worker, was published in The New Yorker on 12 May 2023.
The Pulitzer Prize website shares this biography on Medar de la Cruz.
Medar de la Cruz graduated with a degree in illustration from Art Center College of Design, in Pasadena, California, and has worked as a freelance illustrator for The New York Times and The New Yorker. Beyond the drawing board, Medar contributes part-time to the Outreach Department at the Brooklyn Public Library, where he provides book cart services to incarcerated individuals on Rikers Island. This experience motivated him to explore the role of journalism in his autobiographical comics.
The Pulitzer Prize says that Medar is currently working on a graphic novel about his experiences on Rikers to offer insights into spaces that are otherwise inaccessible to the public. In addition to drawing comics, he serves as an educator, sharing his passion for visual communication through community workshops across the city.
Miami-born Medar Cruz is the son of Dominican migrants NY/. He is the second Dominican to win a Pulitzer Prize. He is preceded by Junot Diaz, the Santo Domingo-born New York migrant, who received the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
The Pulitzer Prizes and Fellowships, established in Columbia University by the will of the first Joseph Pulitzer, are awarded by the University on the recommendation of the Pulitzer Prize Board. The Board meets twice annually. There are 23 categories across journalism, books, drama and music.
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8 May 2024