Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo story named Pulitzer Prize finalist

Haley Cohen Gilliland’s book A Flower Traveled in My Blood, The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children, about the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo’s decades-long search for their abducted grandchildren, was named amongst the finalists of the 2026 Pulitzer Prize’s Non Fiction category. Published by Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, the book was described as “an enthralling history of a human rights movement whose mission remains as urgent as ever” by the Herald’s former Lifestyle editor Jacob Sugarman.  The book recounts the past and present of the organization, which to this day continues to search for the children who were born in captivity during the military dictatorship, and illegally adopted by military families and acquaintances after their parents were disappeared.  So far, they have found 140 grandchildren, of the close to 500 grandchildren they estimate were taken, the latest one in July of 2025.  An interrogation of what it means to pursue — and ultimately find — justice for the victims of crimes against humanity, A Flower Traveled in My Blood depicts real life characters and stories related to the founding and current work of the Abuelas.  In a press statement the Pulitzer Prizes described the book as “beautifully written and well-reported.”  “This nomination is the honor of a lifetime, and I hope it helps spread the Abuelas’ story to an even wider audience,” American author Cohen Gilliland wrote on her Instagram account.  The category’s winner was Brian Goldstone’s There is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America, which focuses on the issues that have created a national crisis of family homelessness among the so-called working poor. Inspiration Cohen Gilliland book’s title is taken from the poem Epitaph by the late poet Juan Gelman, an Argentine exile whose son, Marcelo, and daughter-in-law, Maria Claudia, were kidnapped by the dictatorship.  María Claudia was seven months pregnant when she was taken, and her mother, María Eugenia Casinelli, became a founding member of the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo.  In 2000, Gelman found their granddaughter, Macarena, in Montevideo, Uruguay. She’d been given to a Uruguayan police officer and his wife at birth. Gilliland uses the opening line as a greater metaphor for the grief that binds these mothers and grandmothers to their missing progeny: “A bird lived in me. A flower traveled in my blood.”