Apr 13, 2017 09:41 AM EDT By Emily Marks, UniversityHerald Reporter

Harvard University had a lot of representatives in this year's Pulitzer Prizes. The winners were announced last Monday.

Alumni of the Ivy League institutions won the prizes for various fields such as literature, journalism and music, among others. The Harvard Gazette reported that sociologist Matthew Desmond won for general nonfiction while Colson Whitehead of the class of 1991 won for his fictional work.

David Fahrenthold, who graduated from Harvard in 2000, got honored for national reporting. Du Yun, a composer who took up his PhD in music in the Ivy League institution, won in the Pulitzer Prizes as well.

Nick Nehamas of class 2011 was also honored for his work on the Miami Herald team. This was when the group won in explanatory reporting for coverage of the Panama Papers.

Desmond was honored for his book, entitled "Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City." The urban sociologist followed eight families for his research on poverty.

Speaking to The Harvard Gazette last year, Desmond admitted that he wanted to use eviction to tell a story about poverty but did not realize how common it was. He found that one in eight renters in Milwaukee experience being forced to move every two years.

Farenthold won a Pulitzer Prize for his work in investigating Donald Trump's philanthropy in The Washington Post. He learned that the current President of the United States stopped distributing the $6 million that he'd raised for veterans even after he had given out a fraction of what he raised.

This led to a larger investigation that expanded to cover all of President Trump's charitable giving. Farenthold also shared the illusions that the real estate magnate created, which made his philanthropy appear more impressive than it actually was.

Whitehead won for his fictional novel "The Underground Railroad," which was honored for its intelligent melding of realism and allegory that combines the violence of slavery and the drama of escape. Yun's opera, "Angel's Bone," also won a Pulitzer Prize.

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