The With Good Reason radio program and podcast, produced by Virginia Foundation for the Humanities (VFH), announces upcoming episodes featuring Pulitzer Prize winners, as part of a special series celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Prizes.

Throughout 2016, With Good Reason will air eight half-hour episodes featuring individual Pulitzer Prize winners in conversation with host Sarah McConnell. The inaugural episode in the Pulitzer100 series aired March 12-18 and featured Rick Atkinson, who has won three Pulitzer Prizes for works he has written or contributed to over his long career as a journalist and historian. It is available for streaming and download online. Upcoming episodes include:

Pulitzer100: Stories in Science — Airing April 16 – 22 (Earth Day feature)
Toms River, NJ, was just like any other town in America—except that children were dying at a very high rate. For Earth Day, With Good Reason speaks with Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Dan Fagin, whose 2013 book Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation tells the story of how that New Jersey town fought against the pollution—and polluters—killing their children. Fagin also discusses his current project, a book that follows the plight of the monarch butterfly as it tries to survive the very real changes humans have brought to our planet.

Pulitzer100: Shifting the Spotlight — Airing May 14 – 20
The word obscenity comes from the Greek concept of “off-stage.” Violence, sexuality, abuse—these are things that we consider private, things that should happen off-stage. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel brings these perceived obscenities into the public eye and under the theatre spotlight. Throughout her accomplished career, Vogel has tackled traditionally taboo subjects including homosexuality, race, incest, and abuse. She received the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play How I Learned to Drive. Vogel has also distinguished herself as an exceptional teacher of young playwrights; three of her students have gone on to win Pulitzer Prizes.

Additional confirmed guests in the Pulitzer100 series include Caroline Shaw, who became the youngest recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2013 for her composition Partita for 8 Voices, and Natasha Trethewey, who won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her 2006 collection Native Guard. These and other subsequent episodes in the series will air in June, September, October, November and December; details will be announced online. With Good Reason airs on 65 radio stations in 32 states across the country.

A $125,000 Pulitzer Prize Centennial Campfires Initiative grant received by VFH funds the Pulitzer100 series, as well as a two-part program that occurred during the 2016 Virginia Festival of the Book, a special Centennial-edition trio of poetry broadsides produced at the Virginia Arts of the Book Center(VABC), and a to-be-announced special live event in Washington, D.C., by BackStory with the American History Guys on the history and impact of the Prizes.

About the Pulitzer Prize Centennial Campfires Initiative: The Campfires Initiative aims to ignite broad engagement with the journalistic, literary, and artistic values the Prizes represent. The Pulitzer Prize Board partnered with the Federation of State Humanities Councils to inspire yearlong programming throughout the country by awarding $1.5 million in grant funding to forty-six state humanities councils. The initiative is supported by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and the Pulitzer Prize Board. To learn more about the Federation of State Humanities Councils, please visit http://www.statehumanities.org. To learn more about the Pulitzer Prizes Centennial, visit Pulitzer.org/centennial.

About VFH: The mission of Virginia Foundation for the Humanities is to connect people and ideas to explore the human experience and inspire cultural engagement. VFH reaches an estimated annual audience of 23 million through Community Programs, Digital Initiatives, Scholarship, and the Virginia Center for the Book. For more information, visit VirginiaHumanities.org.

To learn more about With Good Reason, visit WithGoodReasonRadio.org/.

Maggie Guggenheimer
Communications Officer
434-924-6562