Des Moines Register writer Andie Dominick has won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing, it was announced today.
Dominick was recognized for her series of editorials covering the state of Iowa health care, including the negative effects Medicaid privatization has had on the state’s low-income residents and care providers. Nine of Dominick’s pieces were recognized by the Pulitzer judges, from “Editorial: Fetal tissue bill is anti-life, anti-science” to “Editorial: The misadventures of anti-vaccine lawmakers.”
The Pulitzer committee said Dominick was being awarded “for examining in a clear, indignant voice, free of cliché or sentimentality, the damaging consequences for poor Iowa residents of privatizing the state’s administration of Medicaid.”
It was the second time Dominick, an Iowa State University graduate, has been nominated for a Pulitzer: she was a finalist in 2014 for her editorials critiquing Iowa’s problematic licensing laws in fields such as cosmetology and dentistry.
An Iowa reporter won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 2017 as well: Art Cullen, whose family owns and operates The Storm Lake Times in Iowa’s Buena Vista County, was recognized for “successfully challeng[ing] powerful corporate agricultural interests in Iowa” with his writing. Cullen’s win received international attention, in part because of The Storm Lake Times’ small, family-run structure and circulation of only about 3,300.
Dominick’s win marks the 17th Pulitzer Prize earned by Register staff, and the first since 2010.
Dominick wasn’t the only writer with an Iowa connection to be honored this year. Andrew Sean Greer, a former instructor in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, took home the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for his novel Less. The Pulitzer judges called the comedic tale “a generous book, musical in its prose and expansive in its structure and range, about growing older and the essential nature of love.” Greer hails from the Washington, D.C., area, and currently splits his time between San Francisco and Tuscany, Italy.
Other prize winners this year include The Washington Post for its investigative reporting on former Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore; The New York Times and The New Yorker, sharing a Pulitzer Prize in public service for their coverage of the Harvey Weinstein scandal; photographer Ryan M. Kelly for his photo depicting the moment a car drove through a crowd of protestors in Charlottesville; and Kendrick Lamar for his album Damn., making him the first rapper (and, in fact, the first non-classical, non-jazz artist) to win a Pulitzer Prize in music.
