Pulitzer Prize

From the New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu, a gripping memoir on friendship, grief, the search for self, and the solace that can be found through art. In the eyes of 18-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken -- with his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his fraternity -- is that he is exactly like everyone else. Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream; for Hua, a first-generation Taiwanese American who has a 'zine and haunts Bay Area record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to. The only thing Hua and Ken have in common is that however they engage with it, American culture doesn't seem to have a place for either of them. But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become best friends, a friendship built of late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the textbook successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first meet. Determined to hold on to all that was left of his best friend-his memories-Hua turned to writing. Stay True is the book he's been working on ever since. A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.

Moving through the world in a body that looks different than most, Jones learned to factor "pain calculations" into every plan, every situation. She was born with a rare congenital condition called sacral agenesis, which affects both the stature and gait and so her pain is physical. But there is also the pain of being judged and pitied for her appearance, of being dismissed as "less than." the ways she has been seen--or not seen--have informed her lens on the world for her entire life. But after unexpectedly becoming a mother (in violation of unspoken social taboos about the disabled body), she feels something in her shift, and Jones sets off on a journey across the globe, reclaiming the spaces she'd been denied and had denied herself.

For Ingrid Rojas Contreras, magic runs in the family. Growing up in Colombia in the 1980s and 1990s in a house where "What did you dream?" was asked in place of "How are you?" her world was laced with prophecy and violence. Her maternal grandfather, Nono, was a renowned curandero, a community healer gifted with the ability to talk to the dead, tell the future, treat the sick, and move the clouds. As a young girl, Rojas Contreras eavesdropped on her mother's fortune-telling business from the stairs and waited eagerly for the moment when Mami appeared in two places at once. She was accustomed to "letting the ghosts in." So when Ingrid, now living in the U.S., suffered a head injury in her 20s that left her with amnesia-an accident eerily similar to a fall that had put her mother in a coma at the age of 8, from which she woke with not just amnesia, but the ability to see ghosts--the family assumes "the secrets" have finally been passed down to the next generation. But as Ingrid recovers her memories, they don't come with supernatural abilities. Rather, she is consumed by a powerful urge to learn even more about her heritage than she knew before the accident. Spurred by a shared dream among Mami and her sisters, wherein Nono communicates that he is unable to rest peacefully in the afterlife, Ingrid joins her mother on a journey home to Colombia to disinter her grandfather's remains. With her mother as her unpredictable, stubborn, and often hilarious guide, Ingrid traces her lineage back to her indigenous and Spanish roots, uncovering the violent and rigid colonial narrative that would eventually break her family into two camps: those who believe "the secrets" are a gift and those who are convinced they are a curse. Interweaving family stories more enchanting than any novel resurrected Colombian history, and her own deeply personal reckonings with the bounds of reality, Rojas Contreras writes her way through the incomprehensible and into her inheritance. The result is a luminous testament to the power of storytelling as a healing art and an invitation to embrace the extraordinary.