Two UB alumni win 2026 Pulitzers

BUFFALO, N.Y. – Two University at Buffalo alumni have won 2026 Pulitzer Prizes.

Sara DiNatale shares the explanatory reporting award with two of her colleagues at the San Francisco Chronicle and Juliana Spahr, PhD, professor of English at Mills College, is this year’s winner for poetry.

“I am tremendously proud to see two of our alumni honored with 2026 Pulitzer Prizes,” says Jeff Grabill, PhD, dean of the UB College of Arts and Sciences. “This extraordinary recognition speaks to their excellence and commitment to work that informs the public and advances understanding.

“The remarkable honor reflects not only their individual achievements but demonstrates the power of a strong liberal arts education that prepares graduates for impactful work.”

DiNatale (BA, English, ’15) was on the three-member team at the Chronicle responsible for the “Burned” series, which showed how insurance companies used flawed algorithms and undervalued properties damaged or destroyed by the California wildfires, making it difficult if not impossible for owners to repair or rebuild their homes.

“This is a whirlwind,” says DiNatale, who arrived at the Chronicle a year ago from the San Antonio Express-News, where she received the 2024 George Polk Award for her investigative series into fraudulent door-to-door solar energy sales in Texas. “My immediate reaction was elation, not only personally, but for the two people I worked with on the series who have become really close friends, people who have poured themselves into this project for more than a year.”

Those colleagues, Susie Neilson and Megan Fan Munce, started the series before DiNatale came to San Francisco. Toward the end of 2025, after months of exhaustive work, they saw a new thread involving a state panel that was examining smoke damage claims. They asked DiNatale to follow that story based on her earlier investigative work in Texas.

“The science of smoke damage is a recent subject of study, something insurance companies can exploit when denying claims related to cleaning and restoring a home after it has been surrounded by wildfire smoke,” says DiNatale, a graduate of Lancaster High School, in Lancaster, N.Y. “I’m grateful to have been invited by Susie and Megan to contribute to the series.”

As a UB undergraduate, DiNatale worked at the Spectrum, the university’s student newspaper, all four years, serving as editor-in-chief in her senior year.

“I owe a lot to that experience and to the English department faculty for setting me on a path as a professional journalist.”

Juliana Spahr’s startled reaction to her Pulitzer was one of genuine disbelief.

“WTF,” she thought, sitting in her Mills College office on the campus of Northeastern University, where she serves as Frederick A. Rice professor of English. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said to the two people who had texted her with generic congratulations.

Spahr responded that the messages were sent to the wrong number.

“One of them sent a screen shot back that listed the award winners,” she says. “Then I guess, WTF, again.”

“Ars Poeticas” is a collection about which the Pulitzer committee said “interrogates her relationship to her art form, community and politics.”

Spahr, whose scholarly focus explores 20th century American and contemporary literature and its relation to social movements, came to poetics through higher education. She received her doctorate in English from UB in 1996.

“I realize that doesn’t sound exciting, but I took a poetry workshop in my first year as an undergraduate at Bard College,” she says. “It was less the workshop that mattered than a reading list that was so all over the place and included all sorts of work in translation.

“That is what really changed me.”

When Spahr came to UB to complete her graduate studies, she entered a program that had the active thumbprint of Robert Creeley, a faculty member and one of the most respected poets of the 20th century, who taught at the university for 30 years.

“Creeley had a lot to do with my decision to attend UB, but Susan Howe and Charles Bernstein also played a role,” says Spahr. “UB has this very long poetry lineage, especially for more modernist or experimental writers, a place for idiosyncratic thinking about literature.

“I feel lucky that I got to take advantage of that through the Poetics Program, which was formed my first year at UB.”

William Solomon, PhD, professor and chair of the UB Department of English, says that everyone is “immensely proud” of DiNatale and Spahr.

“To see two UB English alumni recognized in a single year − one for explanatory reporting, the other for being one of the most original poets of her generation – speaks to the range of work our undergraduate and graduate students go on to do,” Solomon says.

“Together they remind us why an English department still matters.”