Nguyen spent his first three years in the US in a refugee camp in Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsyvlania and then with a host family in Harrisburg, where he was separated from his mother and father and sister. “Not everyone would take a whole family,” he says, speaking by phone from Boston. “This period had a big impact on me, I didn’t realize how deep until much later.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning Filipino American journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, who is arguably the most visible undocumented immigrant in America right now, has joined 10 other fellow undocumented immigrants in applying for temporary relief from deportation proceedings under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. The 11 people applied for DACA as part of the “1 of 11 Million” campaign launched on Wednesday, August 20, at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. 

One of the United States' most prolific and beloved authors and poets has died at the age of 86. Maya Angelou was a Renaissance woman whose life inspired six autobiographies, including her internationally celebrated first memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.  Angelou was found unresponsive in her Winston-Salem, N.C., home. Her death comes just days after she canceled an appearance in which she was to be honored at the Major League Baseball Beacon Awards luncheon in Houston.

When we think of failure, our thoughts do not first adhere to beauty, emotional truth, and the deep resonance that introspection allows; the timbre of an experience that can call to us in life’s darkest hours be they night or despair. But this is precisely what poet Philip Schultz’s work pulls forth, whether poems such as those in his collection Failure winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, or Schultz’s beautifully told account of his childhood in the “dummy class” and life as an adult with a learning disability in My Dyslexia.

The details of small-town life in the American West are, as always in Richard Ford's work, richly imagined and closely observed. These details, along with looping meditations on luck, the follies of heredity and the tragedy of bad choices, occupy much of the story in Canada, and would become tiresome if not for the narrator's poignant and elegiac voice. 

In this day and age, there are few writers and journalists who fit the mold of the true literary great.  There is Hendrik Hertzberg of the New Yorker ; Nicholas D. Kristof of the New York Times;  Louis Menand (also of the New Yorker); and Henry Allen, the Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist, formerly of the Washington Post. God, Allen can write. For a number of young Washington-area journalists of my generation who had our eyes on the Washington Post at the start of our careers, Henry Allen’s writings represented what we hoped to achieve: the ability to craft elegant, refined, effortless prose and to present every subject matter (even the most mundane) as important and interesting.

For the first time in 35 years and the 11^th time in history, this year’s Pulitzer Prize deliberately overlooked all three fiction nominees.  Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!, David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, and Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams were speculated to be stranger choices than usual. This motley trio admittedly inspired a  few raised eyebrows, but none were prepared for the news that would precipitate from the Pulitzer Board’s final conference -- that ,in fact, none had been worthy of the prestigious literary prize.