Anthony Davis has won the Pulitzer prize for Music, joining an illustrious list of jazz artists to have won the prize (incl. Henry Threadgill, Wadada Leo Smith, Ornette Coleman and Wynton Marsalis) for his opera “The Central Park Five,” a work that addresses race and judicial inequality drawing from the trial and conviction of one Latino teenager and four black teens later exonerated for the 1989 Central Park rape of a young white female banker, an event that prompted then property tycoon Donald Trump to take out newspaper ads advocating the return of the death penalty. Trump becomes a character in the opera.

An avant garde jazz pianist whose work includes appearances on albums with Anthony Braxton, Wadada Leo Smith and David Murray and whose track record in opera includes most notably X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X Davis told the San Diego Union-Tribune on winning the award: “I hope that, in a way, the opera brings to the forefront the idea that Trump’s ascent to power is a present danger and that, from the beginning, he has exploited racial tensions.''