Nell Lake

This is a beautiful example of writing well about endangered children. Wilkerson’s voice is at once poised, solemn, compassionate and engaging. The detail she has gathered and included is fine…

Orwell uses himself as a character in this piece, in the service of irony. Another character is a dog. We found the dog to be a brilliant, devastating, well-exploited detail.This…

Wilkerson wrote about Angela Whitiker’s son in her Pulitzer Prize-winning story "First Born, Fast Grown." Twelve years later, she chronicles his mother’s successful struggle to earn a nurse’s degree and…

We liked this vivid and engaging study in character. Allen follows the struggles of a novice nurse as she begins training in the most grueling of nursing domains, the ICU…

If there were a genre called moral narrative, this piece (and the book on which it is based) would exemplify it. The driving threads in the story are nothing less…

Here’s what Lake wrote when he emailed us this story: “Lots of people claim their lives have been transformed by miracles. Media coverage of these people tends to swing one…

This is a powerful, honest piece in which Orwell brilliantly gets at the complex human experience of living and ruling in a strange land. It’s a deeply compelling read that…

This series about two men who lost their legs to IEDs in Iraq is built on a wealth of close detail. The piece chronicles their struggles to recover from their…

There are two main characters in this series: first, the illness itself, which ravaged Norfolk and Plymouth, Va., in 1855. It killed one out of three people in the communities…

We like this series for its scrupulous attention to detail. Its descriptive passages pop with verbs; we are right there, walking with the imam as he starts his morning. Elliott…