Brent Staples, AM'76, PhD'82, among alumni awarded for professional achievements, service to University

This article is an excerpt of a UChicago News story. Read the full article on their site here.

Alumni Medal among awards to be presented in Nov. 5 ceremony

The University of Chicago Alumni Association and the Alumni Board have announced the recipients of the 2021 Alumni Awards.

The awards include the Alumni Medal, which recognizes achievement of an exceptional nature in any field, vocational or voluntary, covering an entire career. Traditionally, the medal has not been given in recognition of a single remarkable achievement but has been reserved for those alumni who have attained and maintained extremely high stations in their chosen fields of endeavor and in their service to society. This year’s medalist is Brent Staples, AM’76, PhD’82, Pulitzer Prize-winning editor at the New York Times.

These alumni will be recognized at a Nov. 5 ceremony, which will also honor Profs. Mark Siegler and Geoffrey R. Stone as winners of the Norman Maclean Faculty Award.

Visit UChicago Alumni & Friends to learn more about the Alumni Awards, or to congratulate the award winners.
 

Alumni Medal
 

Brent Staples, AM’76, PhD’82, has been a member of the New York Times editorial board since 1990. In 2019, Staples won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing—the Times’s first winner for editorial writing in 23 years. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning portfolio, Staples highlighted racism in the women’s suffrage movement, showed how newspapers were complicit in Southern lynchings and denounced myths about so-called crack babies.

Editorials and essays from throughout his career are included in dozens of college readers throughout the United States and abroad. Before joining the editorial page, he served as an editor of the New York Times Book Review and an assistant editor for metropolitan news.

Staples holds a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Chicago and is the author of Parallel Time: Growing Up in Black and White (1994), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.
 

Visit the UChicago News site to see the the other alumni honored in this years' awards.