Jill Lepore, the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and professor of law at Harvard Law School, received the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in History for her book, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution (Liverlight, 2026). The prize committee describes Professor Lepore’s monograph as a “lively and engaging narrative that investigates why the Constitution is so difficult to amend, including a review of noteworthy failed amendments proposed by marginalized groups.”
As a scholar, Professor Lepore explores absences and asymmetries in the historical record, with a particular emphasis on the histories and technologies of evidence. She is the author of more than a dozen books, including the international bestseller These Truths: A History of the United States (W.W. Norton & Company, 2018). In addition to her work at Harvard, Professor Lepore has contributed to The New Yorker since 2005, writing about American history, law, literature, and politics.
Professor Lepore holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Tufts University in Massachusetts, a master’s degree in American culture from the University of Michigan, and a Ph.D. in American studies from Yale University. She has received honorary doctorates from Yale, Tufts, and New York University.
Yiyun Li, the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities and a professor of creative writing at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, received the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in Memoir or Autobiography for Things in Nature Merely Grow (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2025). According to the prize committee, Professor Li’s memoir is a “deeply moving and revelatory account of losing her younger son to suicide a little more than six years after her older son died in the same manner, an austere and defiant memoir of acceptance that focuses on facts, language and the persistence of life.”
A Princeton faculty member since 2017, Professor Li previously served as director of the university’s creative writing program. Among her many awards and honors are a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is the author of several novels, including The Book of Goose (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2022) and Where Reasons End (Random House, 2019).
Born in Beijing, China, Professor Li came to the United States to complete a master’s degree in immunology from the University of Iowa. She later transitioned her career to writing, earning a master of fine arts degree in creative nonfiction from Iowa’s Writers Workshop.
Juliana M. Spahr, the Frederick A. Rice Professor of English at Northeastern University’s Mills College in California, received the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Ars Poeticas (Wesleyan University Press, 2025). The prize committee highlights Professor Spahr’s book as a “collection in which the poet takes stock of her personal disillusionment, which she uses to interrogate her relationship to her art form, community, and politics.”
Professor Spahr has taught at Mills College since 2003. During her tenure, she has served as director of creative writing, dean of graduate studies, and unit head for the college. Earlier in her career, she taught English at Siena College in New York and the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Alongside her poetry, Professor Spahr also studies twentieth-century and contemporary American literature. Her numerous publications include Du Bois’s Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment (Harvard University Press, 2018) and That Winter the Wolf Came (Commune Editions, 2015).
A graduate of Bard College in New York, Professor Spahr earned her Ph.D. in English from the University at Buffalo in New York.