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Alumni Success Stories

Edward P. Jones ’72

Edward P. Jones ’72 explores The Known World and wins the Pulitzer Prize, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Growing up in Washington, DC, Jones was encouraged to read by his mother, who never learned how. He made his way from Spiderman comics to serious literature and gravitated to works by Southern writers, both black and white. He applied to Holy Cross almost by chance, motivated by an acquaintance who was studying to be a Jesuit priest. In the first creative writing class offered at Holy Cross, he began to find his vocation.

Later, Jones earned an M.F.A. at the University of Virginia and supported himself writing for a professional newsletter while working on a novel and creating short stories about life in Washington that became his collection Lost in the City. Laid off from his job in 2002, he finally completed The Known World, a stunning novel of slave-owning free blacks before the Civil War.

Despite his literary fame, Jones continues to live simply and has inherited the work ethic of his mother, who washed dishes and cleaned hotels to support her family. “If you write a story today, and you get up tomorrow to start another story, all the expertise that you put into that first story doesn’t transfer over automatically to the second story,” he explains. “You’re always starting at the bottom of the mountain. So you’re always becoming a writer. You’re never really arriving.”