Board Trustee
Eugene Robinson is the winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for his commentary on the 2008 presidential race and writes a twice-weekly column on politics and culture in The Washington Post, where he has worked for three decades in various roles: city hall reporter, city editor, foreign correspondent in Buenos Aires and London, foreign editor and assistant managing editor in charge of the paper’s award winning Style section. He started writing a column for the Op-Ed page in 2005.
Robinson was born and raised in pre-segregated Orangeburg, SC. He remembers the culminating years of the Civil Rights Movement—the “Orangeburg Massacre,” a 1968 incident in which police fired on students protesting a segregated bowling alley and killed three unarmed young men, took place within sight of his house just a few hundred yards away.
He was educated at the University of Michigan, where he was the first black student to be named co-editor-in-chief of the award-winning student newspaper, The Michigan Daily. Robinson worked as a reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle before he joined The Washington Post in 1980.
Robinson was a Nieman Fellow in Journalism at Harvard University in 1987-1988. He is the author of “Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America” (2010), “Last Dance in Havana” (2004), and “Coal to Cream: A Black Man’s Journey Beyond Color to an Affirmation of Race” (1999).
Robinson is a regular contributor to MSNBC as a Political Analyst. In April 2017, he was elected to a one-year term as Chairman of the Pulitzer Prize Board. He lives in Arlington, Virginia with his wife, Avis, an artist and collector.