Paul Muldoon
Citation:
For a distinguished volume of original verse by an American author. Awarded to "Moy Sand and Gravel" by Paul Muldoon (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).
Mr. Muldoon's poetry is difficult and rigorous, but it also "shimmers with play," a reviewer wrote in The New York Times. In "At the Sign of the Black Horse, September 1999," he pays tribute to his countrymen who built a nearby canal, "those thousands of Irish nawies piling clay, hay, hair into their creels and bearing them at shoulder height, or above, with all the zeal of creel catechumens."
Paul Muldoon was born in 1951 in County Armagh, Northern Ireland. He received his B.A. from Queen's University in Belfast and was a radio and television producer with the BBC in Northern Ireland for thirteen years. Since 1987 he has lived in the United States, where he is now Howard G.B. Clark Professor of the Humanities and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University. In 1999 he was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. Muldoon received an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature in 1996. Other recent awards include the 1994 TS. Eliiot Prize and the 1997 Irish Times Literature Prize for Poetry. He lives with his wife, writer Jean Hanff Korelitz, and their two children near Princeton, New Jersey.
Samantha Powers
Citation:
For a distinguished book of non-fiction by an American author that is not eligible for consideration in any other category. Awarded to "A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" by Samantha Power (Basic Books).
Samantha Power is an Irish-born freelancer who went to Bosnia a year out of Yale in 1993 to report on the war, Ms. Power was shocked by the massacres -- and more shattered by the failure of American authorities to stop them, even at a time of high interest in the Holocaust. Ms. Power sought a book to explain the discrepancy found none and decided to write one herself. Ms. Powers, 32, a Harvard Law School gradu ate, is the executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard. Power moved to the United States from Ireland in 1979.
Kevin Sullivan and Mary Jordon
Citation:
For a distinguished example of reporting on international affairs, including United Nations correspondence. Awarded to Kevin Sullivan and Mary Jordan of The Washington Post for their exposure of horrific conditions in Mexico's criminal justice system and how they affect the daily lives of people.
Mr. Sullivan, 43, and Ms. Jordan, 42, co-chiefs of the Mexico City bureau and a husband-and-wife team, wrote a series of articles exposing the horrible conditions in Mexico's criminal justice system and their effect on people's daily lives.
Mary Jordan is the co-bureau chief of The Washington Posts's Mexico City Bureau. She arrived there in June 2000, just days before the historic election of Vicente-Fox and has written on the country's transition to democracy.
Jordan graduated from Georgetown University in 1983, and spent her junior year studying Irish literature at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. She earned a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University in 198d. She was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1989-1990. She spent the 1994 95 academic year studying at Georgetown University in preparation for an assignment in Tokyo. In preparation for her Latin American assignment, she spent the 1999-2000 academic year at Standford University. Jordan is married to Kevin Sullivan, The Post's other co-bureau chief in Mexico. They have two children.
Kevin Sullivan has been co-bureau chief of The Washington Posts's Mexico City Bureau since 2000, covering Mexico, Cuba and Central America. He held the same position in the Post's Tokyo bureau from 1995 to 1999, where he covered Japan, the Korean Peninsula and much of Asia.
From 1986 until 1990, Su(livan worked at the Providence Journal-Bulletin in Rhode Island, where he wrote stories from the Persian Gulf, Northern Ireland and Colombia. His story on the drug cartels in Medellin, Colombia, won an award from the Inter-American Press Association in 1990. Sullivan graduated from the University of New Hampshire in 1981. He spent the 1994-1995 academic year studying at Georgetown University in preparation for his assignment in Tokyo. During the 1999-2000 academic year he was a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University, where he studied Spanish and Latin American affairs to prepare for his assignment to Mexico.
