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19 Facts About Brent Staples

1.

Brent Staples was born on 1951 and is an American author and member of the editorial board of The New York Times, where he specializes in coverage of education, criminal justice and economics.

2.

Brent Staples's books include An American Love Story and Parallel Time: Growing up In Black and White.

3.

Brent Staples writes about political, social and cultural issues, including race and the state of the American school system.

4.

Brent Staples's memoir Parallel Time was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.

5.

Brent Staples won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing and is a fellow of the Society of American Historians.

6.

Brent Staples has been a visiting fellow at several academic institutions.

7.

Brent Staples's parents moved from rural Virginia to Chester as part of the Second Great Migration of Southern Blacks to urban centers in the North.

8.

Brent Staples's father was a truck driver and his mother a homemaker.

9.

Brent Staples's family had no money for tuition; his grades were average, and he had taken only a few high-level academic courses in high school.

10.

Brent Staples was convinced to attend Widener University by the only African American professor at the school as part of a program named Project Prepare.

11.

Brent Staples was awarded two doctoral fellowships from the Danforth Foundation and the Ford Foundation.

12.

Brent Staples received a master's degree in psychology in 1976 and a Ph.

13.

In 1983, his younger brother, Blake, a cocaine dealer, was murdered by a client, which forced Brent Staples to reconsider his own success and his inability to stop his brother's life choices.

14.

Brent Staples taught psychology at Widener University and various institutions in Chicago from 1977 to 1981, but began to pursue a separate career track in journalism.

15.

In 1985, Brent Staples joined the staff of The New York Times as an editor of the Book Review and subsequently became assistant metropolitan editor.

16.

In 2000, Brent Staples received an honorary doctorate degree in humane letters from Mount Saint Mary College.

17.

Brent Staples has served as a visiting fellow at such institutions as the Hoover Foundation, the University of Chicago and Yale University.

18.

In 2019, Brent Staples won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing.

19.

Brent Staples's editorials highlighted the history of racism in the United States and were described by the Pulitzer Prize committee as being "written with extraordinary moral clarity".