Tennessee's Karlyn Pickens and Texas Tech's NiJaree Canady were the top two picks in the Athletes Unlimited Softball League draft on Monday night.
Pickens went to the Carolina Blaze, where she will play in her home state of North Carolina. She got the softball world's attention last season when she fired a pitch 79.4 mph during super regionals — the fastest pitch on record. This season, she has a 13-7 record with a 1.44 earned run average and 154 strikeouts in 112 innings.
“Our staff believes Karlyn is the whole package,” Blaze general manager Dana Sorensen said in a statement. “She is an ultimate competitor, and we feel that four years pitching in the SEC has given her the best preparation for the pro league."
The Texas Volts chose Canady, who made waves by signing two deals worth more than $1 million at Texas Tech. She has a 21-4 record this season with a 1.30 ERA and 194 strikeouts in 135 innings. She led the Red Raiders to a national runner-up finish last season.
Belmont pitcher Mya Johnson went third to the Oklahoma City Spark. She leads the nation with a 0.72 earned run average.
The 17 players selected were previously identified through AUSL’s Golden Ticket program, which included on-campus presentations across the country in recent weeks. The season begins June 9.
UCLA's Megan Grant went fourth to the Portland Cascade. She ranks second nationally with 35 home runs. Florida's Jocelyn Erickson went sixth to the Chicago Bandits. UCLA's Jordan Woolery, who has 33 home runs and leads the nation with 106 RBIs, went seventh to the Utah Talons to close out the first round.
Second round picks were Texas' Reese Atwood (Carolina) and Leighann Goode (Texas Volts), Arizona's Sydney Stewart (Portland), Mississippi State's Peja Goold (OKC), Stanford's Taryn Kern (Chicago) and UCLA's Taylor Tinsley (Utah).
Third rounders were Oklahoma's Ailana Agbayani (Chicago), Oregon's Amari Harper (OKC), Arizona State's Kenzie Brown (Portland) and Arkansas' Dakota Kennedy (Carolina).
Portland made Florida's Kenleigh Cahalan the final overall selection.
AP sports: https://apnews.com/sports
FILE - Texas Tech starting pitcher/relief pitcher Nijaree Canady (24) during an NCAA softball game against CS Fullerton on Saturday, Feb. 21, 2026, in Cathedral City, Calif. (AP Photo/Mike Buscher,File)
FILE - Tennessee starting pitcher/relief pitcher Karlyn Pickens (23) during an NCAA softball Women's College World Series game, Thursday, May 29, 2025 in Oklahoma City. (AP Photo/Vera Nieuwenhuis,File)
NEW YORK (AP) — Pulitzer Prize officials awarded the fiction prize to an author with a history of experimenting with genres and with language itself: Daniel Kraus, cited for “Angel Down,” a World War I narrative with a celestial twist that unfolds over some 300 pages in one long sentence. “Liberation,” Bess Wohl's look back at the feminist consciousness-raising groups of the 1970s, received the drama prize.
Winners announced Monday include two books rooted in the country's founding. Jill Lepore's “We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution” won for history, and Amanda Vaill's “Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution” was the winner for biography. Yiyun Li’s “Things in Nature Merely Grow,” her blunt account of the suicides of her two sons, was cited for memoir-autobiography. “There is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America,” by Brian Goldstone, won for general nonfiction.
The poetry prize went to Juliana Spahr's “Ars Poeticas,” and the music award was given to Gabriela Lena Frank for “Picaflor: A Future Myth,” a symphonic work inspired by Andean legend and California wildfires.
The 50-year-old Kraus has had a diverse and prolific career quite unlike the average Pulitzer fiction winner. He has written horror, science fiction, graphic novels and books for kids. He has collaborated with filmmakers George Romero and Guillermo del Toro, whose Oscar-winning “The Shape of Water” was conceived with Kraus' help. He has received numerous prizes over the years, including the Bram Stoker Award for horror, but had never imagined he'd win a Pulitzer. When he began receiving texts Monday — that included such messages as “Wow!” — he worried that he had somehow gotten himself in trouble.
Pulitzer officials praised “Angel Down” as “a stylistic tour-de-force that blends such genres as allegory, magical realism, and science fiction into a cohesive whole, told in a single sentence.” Kraus said that he at first used a conventional narrative but found that abandoning traditional punctuation better suited a story of war that seemingly had no end.
“It's like you have the feeling of being locked into the book forever,” he told The Associated Press during a telephone interview.
Wohl’s memory play collects second-wave feminists from all walks of life as they tackle misogyny, internalized homophobia, domestic abuse and gender roles. The play navigates between past and present, and six of the actors disrobe for the Act 2 opening scene. The win comes a day before the Tony Award nominations, when “Liberation” is expected to be named in the best new play category.
Lepore is a New Yorker staff writer and Harvard University professor whose Pulitzer helps confirm her as one of the country's most prominent historians. Her previous honors include the Bancroft Prize for “The Name of War” and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for “New York Burning.” In 2023, she contributed an introduction to Paul McCartney's book of Beatles photos, “1964: Eyes of the Storm.”
Goldstone is a journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic and other publications. Spahr is a poet, critic and editor whose prize-winning collection is a statement of poetry's vitality during the darkest times, and Frank is a Grammy-nominated artist known for combining influences ranging from Latin American folklore to Western classical music.
Associated Press Entertainment Writer Mark Kennedy contributed.
FILE - Signage for The Pulitzer Prizes appear at Columbia University, May 28, 2019, in New York. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews, File)
FILE - Bess Wohl attends the Glamour Women of the Year Awards at The Plaza Hotel on Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2025, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, File)
