Quiara Alegría Hudes won the 2012 Pulitzer for her play Water by the Spoonful

Water by the Spoonful, by Quiara Alegría Hudes, won the 2012 Pulitzer for Drama it was announced Monday, April 16. The Pulitzer committee described the play as “an imaginative play about the search for meaning by a returning Iraq war veteran working in a sandwich shop in his hometown of Philadelphia.” The Pulitzer comes with a $10,000 cash prize. The play premiered at Hartford Stage Company in 2011. After the jump are four videos of Hudes discussing Water from the Hartford Stage Company's YouTube channel.

Finalists for the Pulitzer this year included: Other Desert Cities, by Jon Robin Baitz, described by the committee as “a taut, witty drama about an affluent California couple whose daughter has written a memoir that threatens to reveal family secrets about her dead brother”; and Sons of the Prophet, by Stephen Karam, described as “a masterly play about a Lebanese-American family that blends comedy and tragedy in its examination of how suffering capriciously rains down on some and not others.”

The Pulitzer in drama is awarded to a “a distinguished play by an American author, preferably original in its source and dealing with American life.” The committee for the Pulitzer this year included: Steven Leigh Morris, critic-at-large, L.A. Weekly (Chair); Bruce Norris*, playwright, New York, NY; Rohan Preston, theater critic, Star-Tribune, Minneapolis, MN; David Savran, distinguished professor of theatre, CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY; Linda Winer, theater critic, Newsday, Melville, NY.