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Cornelia Grumman after winning a Pulitzer Prize. (Chicago Tribune photo by Terrence James)

Cornelia Grumman T’85

“Alexander Williams, a chronic paranoid schizophrenic,…thinks Sigourney Weaver is God….[P]rison officials in Georgia have been forcing medication on him to make him less insane and delusional [so he can] die by lethal injection for the 1986 rape and murder of a 16-year-old girl….

"Yes, that's what's going on in Georgia: Medicating someone for the sole purpose of making him lucid enough to understand why he is about to be executed for an act he committed while bordering on insane.”

So began a February 19, 2002, editorial in the Chicago Tribune by Cornelia Grumman, one of a series of commentaries on the death-penalty system in Illinois and elsewhere in the United States that earned Grumman the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. The editorials followed an investigation by Tribune reporters that prompted then-Governor George Ryan to declare a moratorium on capital punishment that is still in effect under his successor, Rod Blagojevich.

Grumman calls herself an “accidental editorial writer.” Her first ambition was to own a hotel and restaurant chain and she even went to cooking school in Paris. At Duke, where she was a public-policy major, she was turned on to the news business by participants in the Dewitt Wallace Center's Visiting Media Fellows Program. “A number of folks passing through saw my writing and really encouraged me to go into journalism,” Grumman said in an e-mail and telephone interview. “Robin Wright, global affairs correspondent at the Los Angeles Times, was chief among them. By the end of the semester, all 12 people in her seminar wanted to be foreign correspondents.” Duke, Grumman recalled, was a place where “professors actually cared about undergraduates. People like [lecturer in public policy studies] Bruce Payne and [Professor of French Literature] Wallace Fowlie, and visiting journalists like Robin Wright and [former Times of London editor] Harold Evans, were my saviors and inspiration.”

From rock producer to policy wonk
A sometime columnist and reporter for The Chronicle, briefly co-anchor for Cable 13 (“I got giddy and burst out laughing in the middle of a report on the Falkland Islands invasion”), an intern at WRAL-TV and WTVD, then a cub reporter for the Raleigh News & Observer, Grumman wound up in China as a part-time correspondent for the Washington Post. The year was 1989, the time of the government crackdown on student protests in Tiananmen Square. “I saw the student democracy movement from start to finish, and its aftermath,” Grumman said. She also worked for an American record producer who wanted to bring rock and roll to China. “I was put in charge of an international music hour,” Grumman said. “I picked out music from the Police to the Beatles to Elton John, explained the lyrics to the censors, covering up the sexual innuendos, and wrote a script for a Chinese deejay. The show became hugely popular; people would gather around their radios and tape it for their friends.”

After a stint at a suburban Chicago paper, Grumman went to the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard to get a master’s in public policy. “The Kennedy School enhanced my journalism by teaching me the broader context of issues,” Grumman said. She joined the Tribune as a metropolitan reporter in 1994 and went on the editorial board in 2000. She is one of seven editorial writers, and specializes in education, social policy, juvenile justice, and the death penalty. Grumman is also in charge of political endorsements, coordinating interviews with more than 200 candidates and arranging group debates among candidates for major races. “It was a very good way of seeing what the differences were among the candidates and it made our decisions much easier,” Grumman said. “Public debates are usually not very revealing, either because the candidates aren’t given enough time or they’re not really challenged by the moderator or their opponents. Or the opponents, if there are TV cameras, will challenge them on something completely trivial. If you take the TV cameras out of it and you take the public out of it, they’re playing to the editorial board, and they know we know a lot about these different issues, so what they talk about is very substantive.”

Grumman picked up her Pulitzer plaque — and a check — at a New York luncheon on May 29. “I don’t think I’ll hang the plaque anywhere,” she said. “I’ll leave that to the politicians and the dentists.”

Born: Chicago. Raised: Evanston, IL.

Last vacation: Argentina and Uruguay in April 2003.

Last book read for pleasure: “Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America,” by Erik Larson.

Last movie seen: "A Mighty Wind."

Listening lately to: Puccini’s “Turandot,” the Andy Tuck Trio, Julie Miller, Kim Richey, Kasey Chambers.