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 new student of multimedia narrative may want to bookmark an archive on digital storytelling by Mark Berkey-Gerard, who teaches online journalism at Rowan University, in New Jersey. A Columbia Graduate School of Journalism alum who has won … Read more
In the book Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction, memorably instructive lines for writers and editors appear on almost every page. The authors, the Pulitzer-winning nonfiction writer Tracy Kidder and his longtime editor, … Read more
The story of the week has been Roger Angell’s “This Old Man” (The New Yorker). Angell is widely revered for his body of work on baseball, but in this piece he writes about what it’s like to be 93. As … Read more
From the “Why’s this so good?” archives, a handful of great reads about, or by, brilliant, brave, inspiring women, featuring Joan Didion, Rita Dove, Calvin Trillin, Julia Barton, Edna Buchanan, Ben Yagoda, Walt Harrington and Jennifer B. McDonald: … Read more
On Thursday, we ran Part 1 of Robert Caro’s conversation with the Washington Post’s Anne Hull, on reporting, sacrifice, sources and finding book projects. Today, in the second and final part, Caro talks about his reporting and writing process, how to … Read more
Hearing Robert Caro talk about his work is like getting a master class in longform journalism. A Nieman Fellow, Class of 1966, Caro is the bestselling biographer of Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson, … Read more
The expansive projects that Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron announced today is good news for narrative journalists in two ways: The paper plans to expand the Sunday magazine (we hope it resurfaces as a home for deeply … Read more
On New Year’s Eve, The Big Roundtable published a piece that you might have missed. Steve Kandell, the features director at BuzzFeed, wrote about the freedoms and challenges of working in digital narrative. The “50 or so” … Read more
The Grantland/”Dr. V’s Magical Putter” controversy morphed into a debate today over the nature and value of longform after the New York Times‘ Jonathan Mahler argued, in an op-ed, that “when you fetishize — as opposed to value … Read more
If only we could start an international narrative-journalism conference crawl — sort of like a pub crawl, but with pencils and notebooks — here’s how we’d map out the year: “Power of Narrative: Staying Savvy, Skilled and Solvent in Journalism’s Wired … Read more