Michael Skube, an associate professor in the School of Communications, chaired the General Nonfiction jury for the 2011 Pulitzer Prizes with Robert Lee Hotz, a science writer for The Wall Street Journal, and Arnold Isaacs, a former foreign correspondent and editor of the Baltimore Sun.
The trio considered 338 books submitted by their publishers for the prize awarded by the Pulitzer Board on April 18, 2011, to Siddhartha Mukherjee for The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.
The juries are charged with nominating three books – in alphabetic order by author’s last name rather than order of preference – to the Pulitzer Board. The finalists for 2011 also included The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr; The Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History, by S.C. Gwynne.
Skube most recently served on a jury in 2005 when he also chaired the General Nonfiction jury. In all, he’s served on six juries for either journalism or books and has been chair four times.
As an editorial writer and book critic for the (Raleigh, N.C.) News & Observer, Skube won the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism and the American Society of Newspaper Editors Award for Distinguished Commentary, both in 1989.