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Nick Kotz '55
As a reporter for the Des Moines Register, Nick Kotz won the 1968 Pulitzer
Prize for his national reporting on the conditions in meat packing plants. The
articles, including the disclosure of a 1962 government report, led to the
passage of the Federal Wholesome Meat Act of 1967 and the Meat Safety
Inspection Act, signed by President Lyndon Johnson. Kotz has won many other
journalism awards during his time as a reporter for the Washington Post and as
a freelance writer, including the Sigma Delta Chi Award (1966) for stories on
political patronage in a War on Poverty program.
Kotz has written five books on politics, social justice, and the civil
rights movement. His Wild Blue Yonder: Money, Politics, and the B-1 Bomber
(1989), about the military-industrial complex in the purchase of multibillion
dollar weapons systems, won the Olive Branch Award for outstanding work on
issues of war and peace. His latest book, Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson,
Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Laws that Changed America (2005), is a
definitive account of the relationship between these two American leaders
during the Civil Rights movement. The book has already won the Iowa Book
Award. Kotz's other books include Let Them Eat Promises: the Politics of Hunger
in America (1969); The Unions (1972), coauthored with Pulitzer Prize-winner
Haynes Johnson; and A Passion For Equality: George Wiley and the Movement
(1977) on the social reformer George Alvin Wiley, coauthored with his wife,
Mary Lynn Kotz.
Kotz is a distinguished adjunct professor at the American University School
of Communications, where he was honored with an award for outstanding
teaching. Graduating magna cum laude from Dartmouth, Kotz did his
graduate study in international relations at the London School of Economics,
and later served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps.
Grace Paley '98H
Writer Grace Paley is active in antiwar, feminist and antinuclear movements.
During the 1960s and 70s, she was secretary of the Greenwich Village Peace
Center and traveled to Hanoi and Moscow as a member of peace delegations. In
1978, she was arrested as one of "The White House Eleven" for
unfurling an antinuclear banner on the White House lawn and has been arrested
on subsequent occasions for nonviolent civil disobedience. She has
described herself as a "somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative
anarchist."
Paley was born in the Bronx to Ukrainian emigrant parents. Her first
collection, The Little Disturbances of Man (1959), features stories of New York
life and introduces a semi-autobiographical character who appears in her later
collections, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974), and Later the Same Day
(1985). All three books were gathered in Collected Stories (1994), which was
nominated for a National Book Award. Paley has taught at Sarah Lawrence
College, Columbia and Syracuse Universities, and the City College of New
York.
She was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction (1961), the
Edith Wharton Award (1983), the Rea Award for the Short Story (1993), and the
Vermont Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts (1993). Elected to the
National Academy of Arts and Letters in 1989, she was later made the first
official New York State Writer.
In selecting Paley for the 1993 Rea Award, jurors said, "Grace Paley is
a pure short story writer, a natural to the form in the way that rarely gifted
athletes are said to be naturals." Paley received an honorary degree from
Dartmouth in 1998, was in residence as a Montgomery Fellow in 2005, along with
her husband, the writer Robert Nichols, and was a Brownstone Visiting Professor
of Jewish Studies in 2000. Vermont's fifth Poet Laureate, she is a resident of
Thetford, Vt. and a familiar figure in the Upper Valley.
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