Journalist Dave Curtin (Jour’78) won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 1990 for his story about a . In 2007, he joined the staff at CU Boulder as the executive campus communicator, writing speeches for the chancellor. This summer, he retired after 42 years in writing. Here he reflects on his career and retirement. 

You won your Pulitzer Prize in 1990. How did that experience impact your life and your career?

I was 33 when these two tiny children taught me what’s important and changed my perspective on life. As for my career, it opened doors and gave me autonomy. ​

What drew you to writing and journalism?

The desire to tell stories that could change lives. Many of the stories I told shaped my own life. 

Do you still keep in contact with the family you featured in the story? 

I did for many years – we shared some family holidays together –  but I moved, started a family and they were busy with their lives. I know the children have wonderful families and careers, and it makes my heart sing.

What did you learn about yourself as a writer during that time?

The story is more important than the author, don’t let my emotions bleed into the story, be faithful to everyone in the story, and have the self-discipline to define and fence the story.  

What was one of your more memorable moments while working at CU Boulder?

Returning to work on campus 30 years after graduating, I was astonished by the high school GPAs of the students, the research, the number of international students and the growing diversity of the campus. Most memorable are the students I met every year from all walks of life. I was blown away by their accomplishments and service at a young age, and their humility. They make me proud to be a Forever Buff.  

What does retirement look like for you?

Camping, hiking, climbing, biking, kayaking and skiing with my family. I see Buffs everywhere I go, and I enjoy connecting with them. I’m also attending CU cultural and athletic events and auditing classes. CU is a wonderful community resource.

You witnessed the journalism industry turn from print to mostly digital in your career. Was there a pivotal moment where you saw a clear change happening?

2006-07. It’s now the consumer’s responsibility to harvest fact from fiction. We all depend on everyone taking that responsibility. 

What was it like working as a speechwriter to CU Boulder’s top leader? 

Dynamic and a labor of love. Even after 14 years, I was learning new things daily about the university, it’s fluidity and complexities. Chancellor DiStefano is great to work with. He made tough decisions and kept the ship moving forward. It and it was gratifying to play a role.  

What advice would you give the journalists of today?

Passion, compassion, fairness, objectivity, trust in your editor. And care for your mental health — you’re covering once-unimaginable tough stuff every day. 

Anything else we should know about you?

I’m proud we’re currently a two-generation Buff family. My son, A.J. Curtin (MediaPro’19), graduated from CU Boulder 41 years after I did, in 2019. Of course we bought a brick on the Buff Walk to celebrate!

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Photo courtesy Dave Curtin

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A Rabbit Called Harvey 

It’s been a good run for CU Boulder and the Pulitzer Prizes: In 2016 professor Carter Pann was a finalist in the music category, just a year after professor Elizabeth Fenn won in history.

As it happens, CU alumni, faculty and affiliates have been winning Pulitzers — among the most famous prizes in journalism, arts and letters — for at least 71 years.

Among alumni, the tradition appears to have started in 1945, when Denver native Mary Coyle Chase (A&S’26) won the drama prize for Harvey, her comic play about a genial alcoholic, Elwood P. Dowd, and his six-foot-plus rabbit.

Over the decades, at least 15 alumni, faculty and staff — and likely many more — have won or shared Pulitzers, some while at CU, some later in life. Still others were finalists.

Some individual winners work on campus today: Besides Fenn, for instance, there’s Dave Curtin (Jour’78), the chancellor’s speechwriter, who won the 1990 prize in feature writing while working as a reporter at the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph (now the Gazette).

Many other Buffs have shared group Pulitzers in journalism, the prize’s biggest category. They include university photographer Glenn Asakawa (Jour’86), for staff breaking-news photography with the Rocky Mountain News in 2000, and Doug Pardue (IntlAf’69) of the Charleston, S.C., Post and Courier, which won the 2015 public service prize for a series about the murderous abuse of women in South Carolina.

The selection of Harvey over Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie — now a major theater classic — has raised some critics’ eyebrows in retrospect. But Harvey was the prize jury’s clear favorite at the time, according to Heinz-Dietrich Fischer, author of Outstanding Broadway Dramas and Comedies.

The year 1945 was nearly an annus mirabilis for CU: Not only did Coyle Chase win in drama, but novelist and story writer Jean Stafford (A&S’36; MA’38) was a finalist, too, in fiction. Stafford would later win the 1970 fiction prize for her Collected Stories.

See a list of CU winners. 

Photo by Henry Koster Film Company

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Ten CU Pulitzer Prize Winners

1) Elizabeth Fenn, CU professor, history, 2015

2) John Branch (Mktg’89; MJour’96), feature writing, 2013

3) Jim Sheeler (MJour’07), feature writing, 2006

4) Dave Curtin (Jour’78), feature writing, 1990

5) Loren B. Jenkins, (PolSci'61), international reporting, 1983

6) Jay Mather (A&S’69), international reporting, 1980

7) Jean Stafford (A&S’36; MA’38), fiction, 1970

8) George Crumb, CU professor, music, 1968*

9) Mary Coyle Chase (A&S’26), drama, 1945

10) Frederic L. Paxson, CU professor, history, 1925

Notes:

Many additional CU alums have been members of Pulitzer-winning teams
*Crumb won three years after leaving CU faculty

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Digits

Butterflies

4

Life stages for a butterfly

4/9

Date year-long butterfly
exhibition opened at CU
Museum of Natural History

300

Butterfly species in
Colorado (approx.)

1996

Year Colorado hairstreak
butterfly became state
insect

197

Species recorded in
Boulder County

20,000

Species in the world

3,000+

Miles some monarch
butterflies travel from the
U.S. to Mexico for winter

Making Tuition More Predictable

Planning for the cost of a CU-Boulder education will be easier for Colorado residents following the recent adoption of a new tuition and mandatory fees guarantee. Starting in fall 2016, tuition and fees for incoming freshmen who are Colorado residents will rise modestly, then remain fixed through the four-year period. Subsequent incoming classes will also see an initial increase, then no change through four years. University leaders say the new arrangement better allows students to plan for costs and CU to forecast revenues. The Board of Regents approved the plan in the spring. A four-year tuition guarantee was already in place for nonresident undergraduates. Graduate student tuition still will be reviewed each year. . 

Heard Around Campus 

"Our goal has definitely been to create a very complex picture of Boulder..." — Graduate student Rebecca Zinner (MFA’18) in the Daily Camera, speaking of a digital time capsule about CU-Boulder created by students in the College of Media, Communication and Information.

Betting Big on the Saxophone 

CU-Boulder music professor Carter Pann was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in music for his work “The Mechanics: Six from the Shop Floor.” The Pulitzer jury described the six-part saxophone composition as “a suite that imagines its four saxophonists as mechanics engaged in a rhythmic interplay of precision and messiness that is by turns bubbly, pulsing, dreamy and nostalgic.” The prize ultimately went to composer Henry Threadgill, but Pann is riding high anyway. “This is a real vote of confidence,” he said. Read the full story here. 

Photo by © iStock/Cesare Andrea Ferrari

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Carter Pann was lounging in a Miami pool when word first came. It was a Tuesday and the CU music professor had a three-hour window before an evening performance with the Frost Wind Ensemble at the University of Miami.

A little after 3 p.m., Pann grabbed his phone from the pool ledge. A text from a former student congratulated him on his big achievement: Pann, a composer and pianist, was one of two finalists for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in music.

“I knew the Pulitzer was going to be announced that day,” he said, “but I didn’t give it too much thought because I had submitted a saxophone piece.”

Usually, Pann explained, the Pulitzer committee gave the award to a larger-scale orchestra, opera or jazz work. His submission of a six-movement saxophone work, “The Mechanics: Six from the Shop Floor,” was his third submission in five years, and he wasn’t expecting much. Suddenly he was a finalist.

The prize, announced April 18, ultimately went to composer and bandleader Henry Threadgill. But Pann, 44, is riding high anyway.

“This is a nice vote of confidence,” he said. “That word changes a composer’s profile.”

After the first text message, Pann received about 100 more texts, tweets and emails.

“There’s not a lot of saxophone music out there,” says Pann’s longtime friend Blake Howald, technology portfolio manager in Thomson Reuters and large follower of modern music. “[Pann’s] music is fast-moving, it’s snappy, it hits you and it’s fun. It never becomes gimmicky.” 

“The Mechanics” was first performed and recorded by the Capitol Quartet during their 2013-14 performance season, which was itself a thrill for Pann, who had followed the all-saxophone group for several years. In the spring of 2012, he approached them after a performance in CU’s Grusin Music Hall.

“I basically tackled them,” he said. “I told them, ‘I just want to write for you guys.’”

In May 2013, Pann flew to New Hampshire for a stay at the MacDowell Colony, a forested haven for writers and composers, to compose a piece for the group.

In his tiny secluded cabin, Pann rearranged the furniture so the piano was directly next to a large table with his computer and notepad on it. For 29 days, he swiveled from piano to table, obsessively playing and writing his composition. His only break during the day was lunch delivered in a picnic basket on his porch.

“This piece was started and finished there,” he said. “I just hit it hard.”

His admiration for Capitol Quartet fueled his work. While composing, Pann pictured the foursome dressed as old-time auto mechanics smudged in grease and performing in his brother’s auto shop.

“It’s as if you’re writing a play for a troop of incredible actors,” he said. “I wrote up to these four virtuosos because I knew they could do it.”

Pann started writing music at 16, learning from a composer in his home city of Chicago after his weekly piano lesson. As an undergraduate he studied composition and piano performance at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music, then earned his master’s and doctorate degrees from the University of Michigan Ann Arbor.

Throughout college, he composed music for TV commercials and served as a music copyist for one of his mentors, pianist and composer William Bolcom, winner of the 1988 Pulitzer in music. Pann joined the faculty at CU-Boulder in 2005, after writing classical music and doing more pieces for commercials in Steamboat Springs for two years.

Today he teaches private composition lessons to six students and one course a semester. His favorite class to teach is a Bach counterpoint class. In the spring semester, he taught five graduate students advanced orchestration in his CU music college office, which contains a tiny table, an old couch and his favorite composing tool: a grand piano.

“It’s hard for me to work functionally without a piano,” he said. “It’s become my ball and chain.”

Since the Pulitzer announcement, his CU colleagues have treated him as if he’d won the actual prize, he said.

“There are very few awards in classical music that garner as much respect and recognition as the Pulitzer Prize,” said Robert Shay, dean of the College of Music. “I’m not surprised that Carter’s highly imaginative and energetic ‘The Mechanics’ rose to the top of the selection committee’s list. He has a real gift of drawing listeners in.”

Pann’s new accolade won’t change his working methods.

“It’s almost always a compulsion,” he said.

Photo courtesy Carter Pann

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CU-Boulder historian Elizabeth Fenn’s book on plains indians was a decade in the making.

The news of a lifetime reached Elizabeth Fenn, chair of CU-Boulder’s history department, at about 1 p.m. on April 20, just as she sat at her desk to eat lunch. An email from a New York Times reporter caught her attention: It said she’d won a prize, but not which.

A quick Google search revealed it was no ordinary honor: It was a Pulitzer.

“I wasn’t sure I was seeing things right,” says Fenn, 55, who goes by Lil.

She had won in the history category for her 2014 book , a 10-year project detailing the story of the Mandans, a Plains Indian tribe that lived in what is now North Dakota.

“I never envisioned myself winning,” she says. “I didn’t even know I was a finalist.”

The associate professor is believed to be the first CU-Boulder faculty member to win a Pulitzer. It comes just two years after New York Times reporter John Branch (Mktg’89, MJour’96) won a Pulitzer in feature writing for his story “Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek.”

Encounters at the Heart of the World (Hill and Wang) describes how the arrival of Europeans in the West proved disastrous for the Mandans, who hosted Lewis and Clark during the winter of 1804-05.

“I was blown away by what I learned about these enormous plains populations,” says Fenn. “They deserve to be a part of our early American canon.”

Her research specialty is the early American West, specifically epidemic disease, Native Americans and environmental history. She’s now at work on a book about Sacagawea.

“One of the things I like so much about the early American period and the American West is that we don’t have reams and reams of evidence,” Fenn says. “It allows us to speculate.

Photos courtesy Elizabeth Fenn

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