Two alumnae win Pulitzers

Two Princeton undergraduate alumnae were awarded Pulitzer Prizes in journalism and nonfiction Monday afternoon by a committee at Columbia University.

In the journalism category, Robin Givhan '86 won the Pulitzer for criticism. A staff writer for The Washington Post, Givhan was honored for writing "essays that transform fashion criticism into cultural criticism," according to the prize committee.

Caroline Elkins '91 won the general nonfiction prize in the Letters, Drama and Music category. An assistant professor of history at Harvard, Elkins was honored for "Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya," a historical study of the mass internment and murder of hundreds of thousands of Kenyans in the 1950s.

Elkins majored in history and went on to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard. Focused on African history since her undergraduate years, Elkins wrote her thesis, entitled "The Changing Roles of Kikuyu Women from the Pre-Colonial Period to the Mau Mau Emergency," on Kenya, and has since published journal articles on British colonialism in Africa.

Givhan came to the University thinking she would be premed but eventually decided to major in English and took several creative writing classes, according to a 1997 Princeton Alumni Weekly article. Though she was admitted to law school, she decided to follow Princeton with a master's degree in journalism at the University of Michigan. She did not write for any campus publications as an undergraduate.

Before going to the Post in 1995, Givhan worked for the Detroit Free Press and San Francisco Chronicle.

In January, Givhan wrote about the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito '72. She criticized Alito's wife Martha-Ann for wearing clothes that were "more Redbook than Vogue ... more main floor than designer salon," not quite what one would expect for the wife of such a prominent jurist.

Givhan described Martha-Ann Alito's gold tweed suit as being made of the same fabric as La-Z-Boy chairs, but Givhan received more criticism for calling Concerned Alumni of Princeton "an organization notable for its displeasure over the admittance of women and minorities to the university."

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Alito supporters complained that she had mischaracterized the group but, as Givhan told the Washingtonian, a monthly magazine, in February, "I went to Princeton. I was there in the '80s. I know all about that group."

Elkins and Givhan will receive their awards — a certificate and a check for $10,000 — at a luncheon ceremony in Columbia's Low Library in late May.

Attempts to contact Givhan and Elkins Monday afternoon were unsuccessful.

Last year, three alumni, including a married couple, won two Pulitzers, one for biography and another for history.