By Monique Brouillette and Jacqui Banaszynski Congratulations to Cerise Castle and Carvell Wallace, this year’s recipients of the American Mosaic Journalism Prize. The prize was launched in 2018 by the … Read more
In 1990, Joan Didion received an assignment from Bob Silvers, editor at the New York Review of Books, to write about a highly publicized, emotionally fraught crime almost nobody wanted to read about after it was, in theory, solved. Read more
Most stories about female inventors simply congratulate women for being as capable as men. But Pagan Kennedy, author, podcast producer and New York Times columnist, thinks we need to move beyond this storyline. When she … Read more
On Oct. 9, 1983, the body of Timothy Wayne Coggins, a 23-year-old Black man, was found in the woods off a power line easement in Griffin, Georgia. He had been stabbed dozens of times and an “X,” like the … Read more
The street actions rolling through American cities have aimed a spotlight on police. Sometimes the light is harsh: police seen as militarized enforcers who act with impunity in a culture of racism. Sometimes the light fragments, and reveals complex … Read more
While reading the news in 2017, filmmaker Erin Lee Carr first saw the “very wide, intense eyes” of Michelle Carter. She looked like a “deer in headlights,” Carr said. At the time, Carter was on trial in … Read more
It’s unlikely there was much money riding on Jeff Gerritt to win the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in editorial writing. His newspaper, the Palestine Herald-Press in Texas is tiny: daily circulation about 3,500. Gerritt … Read more
When Dashka Slater looked at California’s parole system, she saw more than a sprawling bureaucracy; she saw a place where people struggled toward redemption. When she followed those seeking parole, the journalist and author found more than crimes and … Read more
It’s difficult to find a writer who isn’t haunted by a story. It could have been the quest that couldn’t catch a glint in an editor’s eye. Maybe one that got away when sources, or record keepers, wouldn’t cooperate. Read more
The image is stark, hypnotic: a road, framed by towering pines, bathed in the blue light of late night or early dawn. The curve of a guardrail and a pickup truck’s headlights blur in the mist. Superimposed over the … Read more