2021 Recipients
2021 Recipients
Jessica Camille Aguirre
Jessica Camille Aguirre is a journalist from California. Her writing, mostly focused on climate, nature and people at extremes, has appeared online or in print at The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, n+1, The New York Review of Books and Vanity Fair.
Sam Bloch
Sam Bloch is a contributing writer at The Counter, where he covers business, environment and culture. His work has appeared in The New York Times, L.A. Weekly, Places Journal, and Bloomberg CityLab, and he is writing a book about shade for Random House. Bloch lives in New York.
Mark Braude
Mark Braude is the author of The Invisible Emperor (Penguin Press, 2018) and Making Monte Carlo (Simon & Schuster, 2016). He has been a visiting fellow at the American Library in Paris, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, and an NEH Public Scholar. He lives in Vancouver with his wife and their two daughters.
Heather Clark
Heather Clark is the author of three award-winning books, most recently Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the LA Times Book Prize, and winner of the Slightly Foxed Prize for Best First Biography. She lives in New York.
Meehan Crist
Meehan Crist is writer in residence in biological sciences at Columbia University. Her work has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, the London Review of Books, and The Atlantic. She is co-editor of What Future 2018(Unnamed Press) and her nonfiction book about the climate crisis, Is It OK to Have a Child?, is forthcoming from Random House and Chatto & Windus.
Marlene L. Daut
Marlene L. Daut teaches Caribbean Studies at the University of Virginia and is the author of Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution and Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism. She also co-edited the volume, Haitian Revolutionary Fictions: An Anthology. Her next book, The First and Last King of Haiti, is forthcoming with Knopf/Pantheon.
Gwendolyn Harper
Gwendolyn Harper is a writer and literary translator. Her translation of Pedro Lemebel’s crónicas, Wild Desire and Other Writings, is forthcoming from Penguin Classics and Pushkin Press (UK) in 2023. She’s received a literature grant from the NEA, and studied at both Yale and Brown. She lives in Northern California.
Emmanuel Iduma
Emmanuel Iduma is the author of A Stranger’s Pose, a book of travel stories. I Am Still With You, his memoir on the aftermath of the Nigerian civil war, is forthcoming from Algonquin.
Jori Lewis
Jori Lewis is an award-winning journalist who writes about agriculture and the environment. Her reports have appeared on PRI’s The World, and in Discover Magazine, Pacific Standard and the Virginia Quarterly Review, among others. Lewis splits her time between Illinois and Senegal. Slaves For Peanutsis her first book.
Samanth Subramanian
Samanth Subramanian is a writer and journalist living in London. His most recent book, A Dominant Character: The Radical Science and Restless Politics of JBS Haldane, was one of the New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of 2020.
Justine van der Leun
Justine van der Leun is an independent journalist and an Emerson fellow at the New America Foundation. She is writing Unreasonable Women: Survival, Punishment, and Mass Incarceration in America, which will explore the criminalization of women’s acts of survival from physical and sexual abuse, to be published by Ecco Books.
Ali Winston
Ali Winston is an investigative reporter covering criminal justice, civil liberties and extremism. His reporting has appeared in a wide range of outlets including the BBC, ProPublica, PBS Frontline and the New York Times, and has been honored with several national awards, including the George Polk Award & the Alfred I. du Pont Award. He is a graduate of the University of Chicago and the University of California-Berkeley.
Emily Raboteau
Emily Raboteau writes at the intersection of social and environmental justice, race, climate change, and parenthood. Her new book, Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “the Apocalypse” is forthcoming in the spring of 2024. Her previous books are Searching for Zion (2013), winner of an American Book Award and finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the cult classic novel, The Professor’s Daughter (2005). Since the release of the 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, she has focused on writing about the climate crisis. A contributing editor at Orion Magazine and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, Raboteau’s essays have recently appeared and been anthologized in the New Yorker, the New York Times, New York Magazine, The Nation, Best American Science Writing, Best American Travel Writing, and elsewhere. She lives in the Bronx with her husband, the novelist Victor LaValle, and their two children.