Composer Susie Ibarra, author Percival Everett and playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins have been named the 2025 Pulitzer Prize winners in music, fiction and drama, respectively. The prestigious awards were announced overnight in a ceremony held in New York City.

Filipina-American composer and percussionist Susie Ibarra received the Pulitzer Prize for music for Sky Islands, a work focused on ecosystems and biodiversity. Premiered at the Asia Society in New York in July 2024, the piece explores the role of the soloist as both improviser and compositional voice. The board hailed it as a work “that challenges the notion of the compositional voice by interweaving the profound musicianship and improvisational skills of a soloist as a creative tool.”

Susie Ibarra. Photo © Tony Cenicola

Ibarra, who studied with notable jazz and avant-jazz drummers Vernel Fournier, Earl Buster Smith and Milford Graves, has previously been named Best Percussionist in the 2010 Downbeat International Readers Poll

Everett took out the fiction prize for James, a reimagining of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn told from the perspective of the enslaved character Jim. The Pulitzer board praised the novel as “an accomplished reconsideration … that gives agency to...