Two weeks ago Monday, a friend tipped Power off that the Pulitzers were about to be announced. Had this friend not mentioned it, Power says, she would not have been thinking about the award.
Then DuBois Professor of the Humanities Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr., a member of the Pulitzer committee, called her office as she was rushing to prepare for her class at the Kennedy School. “[For] twenty seconds, I thought I had won a Pulitzer,” Power says.
But Gates let on that he was calling to give her another award—a prize for the best book about race relations.
Later that afternoon, as she was about to begin an interview with the only openly HIV-positive South African judge, she heard her cellphone—which she had meant to turn off—ringing. When she answered, she found a Basic Books publishing executive on the line offering to take her to dinner.
“I thought that this wasn’t a particularly good time to celebrate with everything going to hell and Michael Kelly killed just three days before,” Power says.
Quickly, though, she says she realized that the dinner was to celebrate winning the Pulitzer and was “stupefied and breathless for the next twenty seconds.”
She describes the few days since then as having been an “out of body experience.”
Winning the Pulitzer will give Power an added platform—apart from her academic position—from which to stress the moral imperative of recognizing crimes against humanity. This “snob factor,” she says, will give her the opportunity to speak to the gatekeepers, though she plans to “think strategically about how to use the battles.”
And she’s already thinking about where to turn now.
She says her next fight will likely focus on the AIDS problem in Africa.
“A whole continent is disappearing,” she said. “It’s so bad that we can’t wrap our mind around it and it doesn’t require risking lives to show commitment.”
The larger discussion Powers hopes to inspire is one reflecting upon the flaws of U.S. foreign policy in the 20th century, she says.
“The U.S. is a global citizen and must reflect a responsible citizenship,” she says. “This is something the book demands.”
—Staff writer Nicole B. Usher can be reached at usher@fas.harvard.edu..