06-05-2025
Esquire Wins a Pulitzer Prize
Esquire is greatly pleased and proud to announce that it has been awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for 'A Death in Alabama,' by Mark Warren, published in the March 2024 edition. It is the first Pulitzer in the magazine's storied 92-year history.
This extraordinary, deeply moving account tells the remarkable story of a beloved Baptist pastor and mayor in a small town in Alabama, Bubba Copeland, who took his own life after a right-wing news website exposed private online activities he'd engaged in that involved transgender role play.
With great sensitivity, Warren, an author and a former longtime editor at Esquire, interviewed scores of Copeland's friends, family, townspeople, and fellow congregants in order to render a heartbreaking account of the man's final days, and to portray the full scope of the visceral, grief-stricken, perhaps counterintuitive response of a small southern town in all its rich complexity. In so doing, he illuminates how very much was lost when Copeland was driven to despair. The story explores themes of immediate, even urgent relevance: our evolving norms of gender and sexual difference, the brutal culture wars that have us tearing at one another often without thought or regard, the profound effect of social media on our lives, and the astonishing power of the Internet.
The distinction comes on the heels of Esquire's National Magazine Award for General Excellence, presented in February by the American Society of Magazine Editors, for, as the name implies, all the work Esquire does, and aspires to do, across its many forms and expressions. So all in all, it's been a pretty good past few months around here. We're going to take a moment to raise a glass, to appreciate our colleagues, and then to dedicate ourselves to redoubling our efforts and continuing mission. We hope you'll join us wherever you are.
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