Short Takes

Composer David Lang, ’78, and poet Robert Hass, PhD ’76, won Pulitzer Prizes in April. Lang was honored for The Little Match Girl Passion, which premiered at Carnegie Hall in October. Hass’s collection Time and Materials had earlier won the 2007 National Book Award. • Vanessa Hua, MA ’97, a student in the creative-writing program at UC-Riverside, won the Atlantic Monthly student fiction contest with her story, “What We Have Is What We Need.” • MFA candidates Nicholas Berger, director of The Legend of Rosalie, and Emmanuel Dayan, director of Song of a Sperm Donor, are finalists in the 35th annual Student Academy Awards. • Humboldt County, about a disillusioned medical student who falls in with a family of marijuana growers, had its premiere at the Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas. The movie was directed and written by Darren Grodsky and Danny Jacobs, ’01.