Nell Lake

This is an efficient, clearly recounted story about the rescue of a fishing boat that got caught in Hurricane Katrina. The structure is coherent and divided well into its six…

Kiernan neither romanticizes nor demonizes her characters in this story. Her approach to the story is complex and intelligent. We like the lead, which imparts so much information in an…

In this short piece, Benham must do justice to the bizarreness of the event and its details but not belittle the little girl’s fear and injury. We like the details…

This is a lovely series. We like the precision of the writing, the sensible yet sensitive attention to the protagonist’s complicated immigrant life. Persaud writes respectfully and with poise, never…

This is a courageous series. Sugg looks closely, with compassion and detachment, at a subject that is doubly difficult: death among children. We admired her unflinching yet sensitive examination of…

Okay, so this series isn’t strictly narrative. It’s an exploration, via deep-thinking scientists, of some of the big questions of human existence. But it uses an important element of narrative—a…

This piece goes to show that in skilled hands, a “how I got the story” narrative can beguile readers, making them willing to encounter difficult, and in this case obscure,…

This piece is the work of a fine storyteller. We admire Fisher’s purposeful movement from one development to another while covering a slew of characters—often probingly, always with sensitivity and…

Seniesa Estrada and her father live in a gang-ridden, poor area of LA. When she’s eight, Seniesa decides she wants to box. It turns out she’s good at it—and that…

We like the lead in this piece: It’s got nice detail and foreshadows death. Gurnett then reconstructs her main character’s suicide attempt. We’d like to propose that the piece would…