Paige Williams writes for The New Yorker and is an associate professor at the Missouri School of Journalism. Winner of the National Magazine Award for feature writing in 2008, and a finalist in 2011 and 2009 (shared) , she has been anthologized in five volumes of the Best American series, including twice in The Best American Magazine Writing. She is the former editor of Nieman Storyboard and has taught narrative nonfiction at Harvard, M.I.T., NYU, Emory, the University of Pittsburgh, and at her alma mater, the University of Mississippi. She was a ’97 Nieman Fellow and holds an MFA in fiction from Columbia University. Her narrative nonfiction book “The Dinosaur Artist” is forthcoming, from Hachette, in Fall 2016.
The City & Regional Magazine Association announced its latest winners this week. The annual prizes are administered by the Missouri School of Journalism at the University of Missouri. Five great … Read more
Two notable narratives for your consideration this week, both on the loss of a loved one, to cancer: In “The Day I Started Lying to Ruth,” a long reported essay in New York magazine, Memorial Sloan Kettering oncologist Peter Bach captures … Read more
This year’s International Association for Literary Journalism Studies* started today in Paris, and you can follow along via #IALJS9 or watch the events live. The full conference program is here. Ten recommended panels or presentations: “Hearing Their Voices: How Multimedia Changes the … Read more
Last week, a student asked for notable examples of the write-around, that subgenre in which the journalist had limited to no access with the story subject. The most famous examples are Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” … Read more
A story without sound lies too dead on the page. Imagine “Mrs. Kelly’s Monster,” by Jon Franklin, without the pop … pop … pop of the operating-room sensors. Or Tom Wolfe‘s “The Girl of … Read more
Our latest Notable Narrative, “For Richard family, loss and love,” is a two-part series by David Abel* of the Boston Globe. Abel spent six months with the Richards, a family of Boston Marathon bombing survivors, … Read more
The Pulitzer judges’ decision* not to award a prize in Features Writing on Monday was disappointing but not unprecedented.** The last (and only other) gap occurred 10 years ago, when stories by Robert Lee Hotz (Los Angeles Times), Anne Hull … Read more
Storyboard isn’t the only Nieman Foundation publication with a rich craft archive. Our venerable sister magazine Nieman Reports maintains a trove of material on narrative and storytelling, and we’ll be highlighting some of that work in the coming weeks. Today’s outtake … Read more
Fifty takeouts from some of the speakers at last weekend’s Boston University conference on narrative, culled from the Twitter feeds of Lauren Alexander, Alletta Cooper, Cat Cowan, Jessica DuLong, John R. Gagain Jr., Sascha Garrey, Nate Goldman, … Read more