Leonard Pitts Jr.
Leonard Pitts Jr. was born and raised in Southern California. He is a columnist for the Miami Herald and won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. He was also a finalist for the Pulitzer in 1992. In 1997, Pitts took first place for commentary in division four (newspapers with a circulation of more than 300,000) in the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors' Ninth Annual Writing Awards competition. His columns on the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman have garnered much attention from his peers and readers alike.
Pitts's column, "We'll Go Forward From This Moment," an angry and defiant open letter to the terrorists, generated upwards of 30,000 emails and has since been set to music, reprinted in poster form, read on television by Regis Philbin, and quoted by Congressman Richard Gephardt as part of the Democratic Party's weekly radio address. He is a three-time recipient of the National Association of Black Journalists’ Award of Excellence, a five-time recipient of the Atlantic City Press Club’s National Headliners Award and a seven-time recipient of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Green Eyeshade Award.
In a career spanning 35 years, Leonard Pitts, Jr. has been a columnist, a college professor, a radio producer, and a lecturer, but if you ask him to define himself, he will invariably choose one word: writer.
He lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife and children.
“When the inky blackness above shades to a deep blue and the stars lose their hard edge and begin to seem unreal, she rises, wrapping the thin sheet about herself, and steps outside into the morning chill.”
“Sometimes, you simply must follow your heart," she said. "No reasonable man can blame you for that." A smile. "No reasonable woman can, either.”
“For the first time in his life, the very first time in his life, he hated her. Or he tried to, at least. Tried mightily. But it is a hell of a thing to hate your own mother, to hate where you came from, to hate what succored you and nourished you when you could not do it for yourself. A hell of a thing to hate that, even when it hates you, even when it calls you a nothing, calls you garbage and tells you to throw yourself away. Because even then, she is still your mother.”
“That's funny, isn't it, how you can know him one way and we can know him some way completely different. Funny how a person can contradict their own self.”
“Don't nobody like a man they can't figure.”
“It occurred to Mo that he didn't have any pictures of himself as a boy. Every photo he owned, every memento of his life, was from after. It was as if he had been born the day he left. He had gone out from here and invented himself.”
“They drove through the intersection and turned left on a street Mo had once known like his favorite song. It was strange to him now and he wondered if that was because of the disease or just the natural effect of change itself, the tendency of things to move around on you, to shift when you weren't looking. So that you could get back and be a stranger in your own places.”
“You could never tell if he was with you or not, so Cooley liked to talk to him just in case. Just to remind them both that this was still a human being. He never wanted to catch himself treating Jack like a thing, a chore to be done.”
“Not everyone has something to say. This will not stop them from saying it.”