A Salina South High School graduate has won a Pulitzer Prize.

Author and poet Anne Boyer, a creative writing instructor at the Kansas City Art Institute and a breast cancer survivor, won the prestigious award in the General Non-Fiction Category for “The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care”.  The book chronicles her diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer,  examining the intersection of social class and medical care

Boyer is a poet and essayist. She was the inaugural winner of the 2018 Cy Twombly Award for Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and winner of the 2018 Whiting Award in nonfiction/poetry.

Boyer was born and raised in Kansas, and was educated in its public schools and libraries.  Since 2011, Boyer has been a professor at the Kansas City Art Institute.

Boyer graduated from Salina South High School in 1991. Then she went to Kansas State University and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature in 1996. A year later, she received a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing at Wichita State University.

The Pulitzer Prize is an award for achievements in newspaper, magazine and online journalism, literature, and musical composition. It was established in 1917 by provisions in the will of Joseph Pulitzer, who had made his fortune as a newspaper publisher, and is administered by Columbia University.