Journalism Salute: The Amazing Story of Pulitzer Winner Medar De La Cruz
His first journalism assignment won the most prestigious award
Medar De La Cruz was the 200th journalist we’ve interviewed over 176 episodes and his journalism success story was the most unusual and remarkable one I’ve heard.
Medar just won the Pulitzer Prize for illustrated reporting and commentary for an illustrated essay he wrote and drew for The New Yorker.
The subject: Being a library worker at Rikers Island prison in New York.
It was his first-ever written journalism assignment.
You really, really, really should listen to my interview with him but I know that not everyone has the time, so let me tell you some things that will give you a good sense of him and the story of his editorial miracle.
Medar The Artist
“Medar is a very empathetic artist, extremely talented just in terms of capturing, whether it’s landscapes he paints out on the street or people he encounters on the subway. He has a strong ability to catch moments, visualize, and draw them. And then he has a deep humanistic sense. The characters feel very full.”
- The New Yorker digital design director Aviva Michaelov
Medar’s artistic origin story dates to his days growing up in Austin and Miami, drawing comics with his friends. There’s footage from his sixth-grade graduation of him saying he wanted to be a cartoonist.
“Something about having vocalized that as a child and knowing that there was proof of it and evidence,” Medar said. “Being able to return to watch that video, I think solidified that goal in my head.”
But artistic opportunities didn’t come easily for Medar after graduating Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. For a time he lived the starving artist life, sleeping in an art studio and selling his comic strips at a New York City subway stop.
I spent Thursday night selling mini-comics for a dollar at the Union Square subway station<3
#diversity #comic
—Medar De La Cruz (Instagram)
Medar The Library Worker
Medar had worked in the school library all five years he was a student at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. There was an appeal to being in a place where anyone could find something about anything that stuck with Medar.
“The stories and lines and history inside the books are wonderful too but I've found an equally satisfying feeling just wandering the aisles of a library and getting lost in the shelves, opening and closing anything with a good title. As if the rows themselves are pages and the library building is a hardcover, the Dewey decimal system is its chapters and I, a human bookmark.”
— Medar De La Cruz (Instagram)
Medar applied for a job teaching English to students in Japan after he graduated college, but when he didn’t get it, he didn’t have a career plan. He crashed on his sister’s couch and delivered food, worked retail in an art supplies store, and got a part-time job at Kingsbridge Library in the Bronx.
He went from there to a marketing job but a year into the pandemic, the position came to an end.
While unemployed, he applied to many jobs, including one working for the Brooklyn Public Library, where one responsibility would be going to Rikers Island Prison and rolling a library cart along rows of jail cells and other parts of the prison with a couple of his colleagues once a week. Because of his past library experience Medar got the job and began working there in April 2022.
Medar’s big break
Medar had made a contact who had seen his strips, New York Times designer/art director Vinnie Neuberg, and in October 2022, Vinnie commissioned Medar to do a small spot illustration for Page A2 (it’s the one of the houses in the middle of the page below).
Aviva Michaelov, the aforementioned New Yorker design director saw a copy of the drawing on Neuberg’s Instagram page and was intrigued. Like any good art director, she scouted Medar, thumbing through his Instagram page, where she learned of Medar’s current job at Rikers. She reached out, eventually asking if he’d like to work on a project together. The idea morphed into a look at the day-to-day life of a prison library worker.
“Why I felt that impulse to work on this article was that when I told folks, ‘This is my job,’ they almost felt bad for me or something,” Medar said. “So they wouldn’t ask too many questions. And I would almost want them to ask me questions, ask me about my job. Ask me what it’s like … I think a lot of people perceive it as a such a harsh thing to talk about that it would be better to just talk about something else.”
The article and illustrations
The first of the 14 images in the piece was one Medar created before the project was even a project – that of a Black prisoner behind bars trying to return a book and put it in between the books that are on the library cart.
Said Michaelov: “The opening panel is an absolutely stunning piece of art.”
“It was one of the ones I worked the hardest on,” Medar said.
The project went through an intense developmental stage and became a challenge of how much Medar could focus without disrupting his work. The Brooklyn Public Library was concerned but gave him permission to do the article.
“All of a sudden going to Rikers Island and doing my job became a different experience because now I'm like looking at tiny details of things that I otherwise would never have paid attention to,” Medar said. “And that's where I'm looking at how many layers of paint are on the walls and what that looks like. The smallest little paint chips. That's what Rikers Island is. It's a lot of paint. I feel like they paint over the walls on a weekly basis and they paint over the bars once a week or something. So you see what's decades and decades of layers of paint, different colors of paint being chipped away. And those are the things that I tried to depict in black and white.”
Read through the piece and chances are you’ll have a strong emotional reaction to a few of the illustrations. The big one for me was a drawing in which a prisoner, who was in a cell with an opening such that you could only see part of his face, asked the following question.
“Do you got any self-help books?”
“The second and third floor, everybody is in an individual cell,” Medar said. “It would be a much slower process because we would have to wheel our cart over to one person at a time and then that person would look through the entire library cart. We would just be standing there for 10 minutes at a time, if not more. My illustrative mind, my instinct as somebody who draws is to just keep my hand busy. That specific situation I drew in real time. And he asked that exact question.”
Some of the drawings you’ll see in the piece went through as many as 10 drafts
“It's a collaborative process,” Medar said. “And I have to give quite a bit of, of credit to Aviva for being an amazing art director and really not letting me get away with something that otherwise is subpar compared to other pieces in the article and to the editors who, who would help me. Specifically, Daniel Gross is an amazing editor at the New Yorker who would ask me to rewrite something so that it sounded better over and over again until it finally did sound way better than, my first draft ever could.”
Be prepared to be jarred by the kicker. I won’t spoil it. Read the piece!
The Pulitzer
It took seven months to go from initial idea to finished product. The package ran on May 12, 2023. Many months later, the piece was a last-minute addition to the magazine’s Pulitzer Prize submissions. The Pulitzers were not announced until May 6, 2024, nearly a full year after the piece ran.
In terms of its impact, Medar still works for the Brooklyn Public Library but in a different part of the Rikers Island prison, so he doesn’t have a full sense of the response to the piece from those he came into contact with there (UPDATE: Medar e-mailed me after this was published to tell me he resigned from his library job). His Instagram and The New Yorker’s are filled with positive comments from readers. And one part of the library did quickly change, a small victory for those that work there.
“One of the drawings I made explicitly points out that we don't even have shelves for our books,” Medar said. “And almost immediately after, we were given shelves.”
Medar’s life though is forever changed. He lives in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn and is trying to get a contract to produce a book about his work experience. After that, he plans to do a bilingual project about his time living in the Dominican Republic.
The best part of the aftermath of all this is being able to enjoy the best part of being an artist.
“Essentially being able to do what I love and be congratulated for it, be applauded for doing what I would do otherwise,” Medar said. “I did this when nobody cared and I continued to doing this when some people care. I don't care if anybody cares, but if people do, then it's even better.
“I often will be sitting by myself, drawing something and will find myself laughing at my own drawing. Like I get to make myself laugh. I get to make myself feel emotions and I get to be proud of myself. And it's unlike skateboarding, for example. Unless somebody is recording me doing something on a skateboard, I get to experience it, but there's no evidence of it.
Whereas as an artist, the evidence is right there in front of me. And I get to revisit something I did a year later and be like ‘Whoa, I did this. How did I do that?’
I hope you’ll listen to my interview with Medar and will read/see his work at The New Yorker website. I’d love to share his story with a broader audience. If anyone here would be interested in my writing a feature about Medar, please let me know at journalismsalute@gmail.com
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