Pulitzer Prize

CLEVELAND, Miss. -- Natasha Trethewey looks at a photograph and wonders what the camera didn't catch. She tries to visualize the split second of action that was omitted, intentionally or accidentally, by the way a person pointed the lens. Her poetry tries to reveal the action beyond the frame.

How does it feel to share the limelight with rock legend Bob Dylan? This year's Pulitzer Prizes honored two musical innovators who tend to reject categorization: A special citation went to singer-songwriter Dylan, and the annual music award went to composer and Los Angeles native David Lang. In an interview Monday, Lang enthusiastically mixed metaphors: "You know, I am not fit to touch the hem of his shoes. Bob Dylan is the only artist who's in heavy rotation in my household."

The Washington Post dominated the 92nd Pulitzer Prizes for journalism Monday, winning six, including the prestigious public service award for its series exposing substandard conditions at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. The Post received honors for coverage of topics including private security contractors in Iraq, a violin virtuoso's incongruous (and mostly overlooked) performance in a Washington subway station, and Vice President Dick Cheney's sub rosa exercise of executive power.

A Los Angeles Times series describing the profound degradation of the world's oceans won the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting Monday, the 38th time the newspaper has been awarded journalism's top honor. The five-part "Altered Oceans" project, headed by environmental reporter Kenneth R.

A contentious drama pick, an apocalyptic novel by one of the nation's most reclusive writers and one of the first awards to a jazz musician were among the arts Pulitzers announced Monday. Cormac McCarthy, a rarely interviewed figure who has long been one of the most distinctive voices writing about the American West, won the fiction award for his novel "The Road."

Composer and instrumentalist Ornette Coleman logged another breakthrough on Monday. In February, the avant-garde jazz patriarch had taken home a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement while also being nominated for his careening 2006 quartet release, "Sound Grammar." This week, the Pulitzer Prize committee gave this year's music award to Coleman for "Sound Grammar." Well known within jazz's rarefied circles as an improvisational pathfinder, Coleman had established landmarks for 50 years.

David Lindsay-Abaire is safely in the record books as a Pulitzer Prize winner for drama, having been honored Monday for "Rabbit Hole," a critically praised but stylistically conventional play about an investment banker and his wife trying to restart their lives and rescue their marriage after the death of their 4-year-old son.

A quick perusal of the Pulitzer winners for drama clarifies what we've long suspected: Cutting-edge theater rarely carries home the prize. One could, in fact, construct a more dazzling influential repertory from the names left off the list. No Richard Foreman, Maria Irene Fornes, Adrienne Kennedy, Robert Wilson or Karen Finley. No Wooster Group, Mabou Mines, Anna Deavere Smith or Richard Maxwell.

Geraldine Brooks' novel "March" won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for fiction Monday, and the prize for biography went to "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer" by historians Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. These and other prize winners in Letters and Music, along with awards for news coverage, were announced by Columbia University. Brooks' second novel, published by Viking, tells the story of Mr.