He wrote about his family’s loss in a Texas flood. His Pulitzer win is complicated.

The Texas Monthly editor’s deeply personal story about a deadly flood and his family’s survival was recognized with journalism’s top honor

Last year, for the Fourth of July, Aaron Parsley and his family stayed at their river house on the Guadalupe — a one-story cabin on stilts about 50 yards from the Texas river. Parsley’s parents had bought the home because they wanted their grandkids to grow up spending time there.

Parsley, a senior editor for Texas Monthly, described his niece Rosemary as a “rambunctious, expressive, willful little girl with blond hair and blue eyes,” who knows Spanish and calls him Tío. And there was his 20-month-old nephew, Clay — “a towhead who’d just learned to say the words ‘boo’ and ‘yellow.’” Clay adored his big sister, loved trailing behind her.

They ate pizza. Parsley and his husband, Patrick, played hide-and-seek with their niece and nephew before bed.