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.
It’s been a volatile few months for ethics in storytelling, what with the unprecedented “This American Life” retraction of monologist Mike Daisey’s Apple story, and with the unfurled furor over John D’Agata’s anti-accuracy screed in The … Read more
We chose Wright Thompson’s ESPN.com piece “The Kid Who Wasn’t There” as our latest Notable Narrative because the story added a chilling layer to the odd life story of Guerdwich Montimere, the grown man who passed himself off … Read more
Our new “Notable Narrative,” “The Kid Who Wasn’t There,” by Wright Thompson of ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine, unearths the other half of the strange tale of Guerdwich Montimere, a Haiti-born basketball talent who famously passed … Read more
Our bookmarks have been busy lately what with all the good stuff to read and watch and hear. Some of our recent favorites hail from CNN.com, Grantland, the New York Times magazine and Esquire. In case you missed them, here … Read more
It’s been a little over a year since The Atavist debuted as a groundbreaking digital platform for long-form multimedia storytelling. Narrative journalists had been bemoaning the shrinking storytelling acreage, so this app-based venue was met with substantial interest. “E-books … Read more
For our latest Notable Narrative we chose Kevin Sack’s “60 Lives, 30 Kidneys, All Linked,” a New York Times story about an unprecedented chain of kidney transplants. We admired the story as a deft and moving … Read more
Imagine this as a narrative: A man’s child needs a kidney transplant. Despite successfully enlisting an organ donor, the man finds the U.S. transplant network frustrating and ineffective. To spare other families needless anxiety, he sets up an independent kidney … Read more
We promote narrative nonfiction here at Storyboard but occasionally look outside the genre for storytelling inspiration. Paul Harding, who won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his novel “Tinkers,” visited our Nieman Foundation headquarters the … Read more
“The prosecutor wanted to know about window coverings. He asked: Which windows in the house on South Rose Street, the house where you woke up to him standing over you with a knife that night – which windows had curtains that blocked … Read more
In Thursday’s post we excerpted nice lines from the five National Magazine Award finalists in feature writing. These included Luke Dittrich’s “Heavenly Father!…,” from Esquire, about survivors of the Joplin, Mo., tornado, which killed 160 people. Read more