Finalist: Keri Blakinger of The Marshall Project
For her insightful, humane portrait, reported with great difficulty, of men on Death Row in Texas who play clandestine games of “Dungeons & Dragons,” countering their extreme isolation with elaborate fantasy. (Co-published with The New York Times Magazine.)
Nominated Work
August 31, 2023
Biography
Keri Blakinger, currently a reporter at the Los Angeles Times, was a staff writer at The Marshall Project whose work focused on prisons and jails. She wrote “Inside Out,” a regular column published in collaboration with NBC News. Before joining The Marshall Project in 2020, she covered criminal justice for the Houston Chronicle, and her work has appeared in the Washington Post Magazine, VICE, the New York Daily News and The New York Times. She was the Marshall Project’s first formerly incarcerated reporter. Her memoir, "Corrections in Ink," was published in June 2022. She began covering county law enforcement for the Los Angeles Times in 2023.
Winners
Prize Winner in Feature Writing in 2024:
Katie Engelhart, contributing writer, The New York Times
For her fair-minded portrait of a family’s legal and emotional struggles during a matriarch’s progressive dementia that sensitively probes the mystery of a person’s essential self.
Feature Writing
Finalists
Nominated as finalists in Feature Writing in 2024:
Jennifer Senior of The Atlantic
For her exquisitely rendered account of her disabled aunt, who was institutionalized as a small child, and the lasting effects on her family, told in the context of present-day care and intervention that make different outcomes possible.
The Jury
The Jury
Brian Carovillano(Chair)
Senior Vice President and Head of Standards, NBCUniversal News Group
Elizabeth Bruenig
Staff Writer, The Atlantic
Lane DeGregory*
Enterprise Reporter, Hope and Humanity, Tampa Bay Times
Radhika Jones
Editor in Chief, Vanity Fair
Michael Luo
Editor, Newyorker.com, The New Yorker
Michael W. Miller
Senior Editor, Features and WSJ Weekend, The Wall Street Journal
Mark S. Morrow
Editor at Large, The Boston Globe
Winners in Feature Writing
Eli Saslow of The Washington Post
For evocative individual narratives about people struggling with the pandemic, homelessness, addiction and inequality that collectively form a sharply-observed portrait of contemporary America.
Jennifer Senior of The Atlantic
For an unflinching portrait of a family’s reckoning with loss in the 20 years since 9/11, masterfully braiding the author's personal connection to the story with sensitive reporting that reveals the long reach of grief.
Nadja Drost, freelance contributor, The California Sunday Magazine
For a brave and gripping account of global migration that documents a group’s journey on foot through the Darién Gap, one of the most dangerous migrant routes in the world.
Ben Taub of The New Yorker
For a devastating account of a man who was kidnapped, tortured and deprived of his liberty for more than a decade at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, blending on-the-ground reporting and lyrical prose to offer a nuanced perspective on America's wider war on terror.
2024 Prize Winners
Sarah Stillman of The New Yorker
For a searing indictment of our legal system’s reliance on the felony murder charge and its disparate consequences, often devastating for communities of color.
Staff of Reuters
For an eye-opening series of accountability stories focused on Elon Musk’s automobile and aerospace businesses, stories that displayed remarkable breadth and depth and provoked official probes of his companies’ practices in Europe and the United States.
Hannah Dreier of The New York Times
For a deeply reported series of stories revealing the stunning reach of migrant child labor across the United States—and the corporate and governmental failures that perpetuate it.
Vladimir Kara-Murza, contributor, The Washington Post
For passionate columns written under great personal risk from his prison cell, warning of the consequences of dissent in Vladimir Putin’s Russia and insisting on a democratic future for his country.