Wilson Center Alumnus Eliza Griswold Wins 2019 Pulitzer Prize

Wilson Center alumnus Eliza Griswold has won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for her book, Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America. Griswold  is a New York Times best-selling author, and was also awarded the J. Lukas Prize for her book titled The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam, which she worked on while a public policy fellow at the Wilson Center in 2008.

Each year, 2,500 entries are submitted for the Pulitzer Prize, but only 21 awards are presented. Amity and Prosperity won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, which is awarded to authors of nonfiction work that is “distinguished and appropriately documented.” In Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America, Griswold tells the story of the hazardous impact fracking has on local communities. When a fracking drill site opens near her home in Amity, Pennsylvania, local nurse and single mother Stacey Haney becomes an unlikely activist. With the help of neighbors and a husband-and-wife legal team, she begins to investigate what’s really in the water and air, pursuing a court case that begins to expose the damage that’s being done to the land and her family.