KENDRICK LAMAR WINS PULITZER
FIRST RAPPER TO EARN PRESTIGIOUS PRIZE
NOW HE’S GOT a Pulitzer inside his DNA. Rapper Kendrick Lamar made history Monday when he became the first hip-hop artist to win the coveted Pulitzer Prize. Lamar, who won for his 2017 album “Damn,” is the first nonclassical or jazz artist to get the award, which comes with a $15,000 cash prize. The Pulitzer board — which announced the winners Monday — called “Damn,” which won a Grammy for best rap album in January, a work that captures the complexity of African-American life. Lamar, 30, has been hailed for lyrics that are both pungent and poignant. His songs, including “DNA” and “Humble,” cover themes of race and survival in a musical mix that blends hip hop, jazz, soul and spoken word. “Damn” is Lamar’s fourth studio album. Lamar has won 12 Grammys since his debut in 2011. The Pulitzer Prize for public service went to The New York Times and The New Yorker for reporting that sparked the #MeToo movement. Staffs of the Times and The Washington Post shared a prize for national reporting for scoops about Russian interference in the U.S. elections. The awards were announced by Columbia University’s School of Journalism. The public service prize mentioned the work of The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow and the Times’ Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey for stories that revealed sexual harassment in Hollywood and beyond, and put an end to the Tinseltown reign of filmmaker Harvey Weinstein. Ryan Kelly, a former photographer for the Daily Progress in Charlottesville, Va., won a prize for his shot of a car plowing through counterprotesters during the city’s ugly farright rally last August. Pulitzer administrator Dana Canedy’s announcement of the winners marked the first time in the prize’s 102-year history that the awards were announced by a black woman. Last year, the Daily News, along with ProPublica, won in the public service category for “uncovering, primarily through the work of reporter Sarah Ryley, widespread abuse of eviction rules by the police to oust hundreds of people, most of them poor minorities.”