Sarah Stillman

Stillman was raised in Washington, D.C. and graduated from Georgetown Day School, before attending Yale University.^[1][6][7] While in college, she founded and edited an interdisciplinary feminist journal, Manifesta, and co-directed the Student Legal Action Movement, a group devoted to reforming the American prison system.^[8][9] At Yale, Stillman taught poetry and writing at to inmates at the men's maximum-security prison in Cheshire, CT.^[10] As a senior, she won the Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics.^[9] She graduated from Yale summa cum laude in 2006 with bachelor's and master's degrees in anthropology.^[11]

After graduating from Yale, Stillman attended Oxford University on a Marshall Scholarship, where she received her DPhil in anthropology.^[12][11]

She was a visiting scholar at New York University and has taught at Columbia University^[13] and at Yale University.^[14] She is also a staff writer for The New Yorker.^[15]

In 2008, Stillman traveled to Iraq as a journalist where she was embedded with the 116th Military Police Company.^[16][17] She joined The New Yorker in 2012. That same year, she won a National Magazine Award in 2012 for her reporting from Iraq and Afghanistan on labor abuses and human trafficking on United States military bases and a 2012 George Polk Award for her reporting on the high-risk use of young people as confidential informants in the war on drugs.^[18][19][20] Since joining The New Yorker, her investigative reporting has shed light on profiteering in key areas of U.S. life, particularly prisons and jails;^[21] immigration detention facilities;^[22] disaster recovery programs; and U.S. war zone contracting.^[23] She has written in-depth stories on the return of debtors’ prisons, the police use and abuse of civil asset forfeiture, family separations at the U.S.-Mexico border, and more.^[10]

In 2016, while still at The New Yorker, Stillman became founding director of the Global Migration Project at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where she taught a course on “Gender and Migration” and mentored post-graduate fellows on a range of refugee-related reporting projects.^[24] She eventually left the project in 2020.

In 2019, Stillman won another National Magazine Award for her article in The New Yorker on deportation as a death sentence.^[25] She won a second Polk Award in 2021 for coverage of migrant workers and climate change.^[26] The following year, she reported and voiced “The Essential Workers of the Climate Crisis” for WNYC Studios, which won the national Edward R. Murrow Award for best radio news documentary.^[27] In 2024, Stillman won a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for her coverage in The New Yorker about troubling injustices in felony murder prosecutions in the U.S.^[28]

She runs the Yale Investigative Reporting Lab, a collaborative public-interest journalism project that seeks to deepen coverage of criminal justice, climate change, migration, and mental health.^[29] Stillman also teaches narrative non-fiction at Yale University's English Department.^[10]

Along with two George Polk Awards, two National Magazine Awards, and a Pulitzer Prize, Stillman has received a series of accolades for her work.^[30][31][32] In 2012, she received the Hillman Prize.^[33] She received a MacArthur fellowship in 2016 and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020.^[34][35]

She is also the recipient of the Overseas Press Club's Joe and Laurie Dine Award for international human-rights reporting and the Michael Kelly Award.^[36][37]