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.
When students pitch their stories I first make them tell me the story out loud. They resist. They want to write it up, polish and perfect it, but I prefer starting with a raw delivery because sometimes Writing kills Story. Read more
Two AP reporters and an editor on three continents produced the story that we’ve chosen as our latest Notable Narrative. Kristen Gelineau (Sydney), Ravi Nessman (Delhi), and Mary Rajkumar (Miami; she’s the AP’s international enterprise editor) … Read more
A 5-year-old boy and his older brother, who live in a slum of India, board a train to go beg in a nearby city. The boy wakes up and his brother is gone, and the train has taken him nearly a … Read more
In Part 1 of our coverage of this year’s Investigative Reporters & Editors conference, Kiera Feldman, a This Land correspondent, rounded up tips on documents and data, the latest in web research, source relationships, and other … Read more
At last month’s Investigative Reporters & Editors conference, in Boston, hundreds of reporters attended dozens of sessions on everything from analyzing unstructured data to working with the coolest web tools and building a digital newsroom. The conference, which started in the 1970s, … Read more
We’ll be talking to Michael Mooney again soon about a small body of his recent long-form journalism, but today we give our attention to “When Lois Pearson Started Fighting Back,” our latest Notable Narrative. We chose the … Read more
Every crime narrative is essentially a human-spirit story: a spirit uplifted or in free fall. Michael Mooney managed to capture both the dark and the light in his D magazine piece “When Lois Pearson Started Fighting Back.” The … Read more
Before she wrote Silkwood, before she fictionalized her divorce from Carl Bernstein in the novel Heartburn, before she felt bad about her neck or put Sally … Read more
Keeping you up to date on all things Storyboard, we’d like to point out a few new features and opportunities you might have missed. *We’ve collected some of our most popular chats with narrative storytellers in a new #longreads … Read more
In “Question of a Lifetime,” our latest Notable Narrative, Arizona Republic features writer Jaimee Rose tells a moving story about her grandfather’s search for answers regarding a top-secret mission he accepted as a World War II … Read more
