2024 Recipients
2024 Recipients
John Washington
John Washington is a journalist, translator, and author. He is a staff writer at Arizona Luminaria where he writes about democracy, the border, the environment and more. His most recent book, published by Haymarket in 2024, is The Case for Open Borders. He received a 2024 Silvers Grant for his forthcoming book, Americanu: On the Disappeared.
Izabella Scott
Izabella Scott is a writer and editor based in London. Her book, Pleasure Gardens: Blackouts and the Logic of Crisis in Kashmir (MACK, 2024), co-written with Skye Arundhati Thomas, investigates communication blackouts in India-occupied Kashmir. Her writing has appeared in the Financial Times, the London Review of Books and The New Inquiry among others. She received a 2024 Silvers Grant for her forthcoming book, The Bed Trick (Atlantic Books), on sex, deception and the criminal law.
Lila Hassan
Lila Hassan is an award-winning independent multimedia investigative journalist who focuses on extremism, human rights, and immigration. After a stint working in international human rights documentation, she pivoted to journalism and has reported from Cairo, Istanbul, Paris, and New York. She received a 2024 Silvers Grant for a series of articles on ICE’s history of deadly force (Business Insider).
Sean Patrick Cooper
Sean Patrick Cooper is the author of The Shooter at Midnight: Murder, Corruption, and a Farming Town Divided (Penguin, 2024). He’s contributed narrative features and essays to The New Republic, n+1, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Baffler, The Atavist, and others. He received a 2024 Silvers Grant for his forthcoming book, Data Town Blues: Pollution and Corruption in the Underbelly of the AI Boom.
Abhishek Choudhary
Abhishek Choudhary is a writer and researcher in Delhi, currently researching a two-part study on the former Indian Prime Minister A. B. Vajpayee. Vajpayee: The Ascent of the Hindu Right 1924–77 (Picador India, 2023) won the Tata Literature Live First Book award, and was a notable book of the year in the Hindu, the Telegraph and Frontline. He received a 2024 Silvers Grant for the forthcoming second volume, Believer’s Dilemma: Vajpayee and the Lucrative Politics of Hindu Revivalism 1977–2018, will be published in 2025, followed by a single-volume edition in the UK, and Hindi and Marathi translations.
Harry Stopes
Harry Stopes is a writer and historian originally from Manchester, England, living in Berlin. He is particularly interested in criminal justice systems and society, and is currently working on a book about the history of prison. He received a 2024 Silvers Grant for his forthcoming book, The Age of Incarceration: A History of the Prison (WW Norton).
Joseph Lee
Tom Zoellner
Tom Zoellner is the author of nine nonfiction books, including Rim to River: Looking Into the Heart of Arizona. He is a professor of English at Chapman University and an editor-at-large at The Los Angeles Review of Books. He received a 2024 Silvers Grant for his forthcoming book, Desert Rampart: The Coolidge Dam, Gila River, and the Future of Western Water (University of Arizona Press).
Elizabeth Greenspan
Elizabeth Greenspan is a writer based in Philadelphia. Her articles and reviews have appeared in The Believer, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and Places Journal, among other outlets, and she is the author of Battle for Ground Zero, about the politics of commerce and commemoration at the World Trade Center site. She received her PhD in anthropology and urban studies from the University of Pennsylvania. She received a 2024 Silvers Grant for her forthcoming book, The Architects: Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi (WW Norton).
Jeremy Lybarger
Jeremy Lybarger is a writer in Chicago. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The New Republic, Artforum, The New York Times Magazine, Art in America, and many other outlets. He is an editor at the Poetry Foundation. He received a 2024 Silvers Grant for his forthcoming book, Midnight Tremor: The Life and Art of Roger Brown (University of Chicago Press).
Laura Maw
Laura Maw has written for Granta, the New Statesman, The White Review, Hazlitt, Catapult, and Electric Literature, among others. She is a recipient of an Antonia Fraser Grant awarded for the writing of women’s biography, and a Women’s History Network Independent Researcher Fellowship for 2023-24. Ordinary Treasure: Radical Portraits of Working Class Women Writers is her first book, and will be published by Virago in 2026. She lives in Manchester.
Richard Schweid
Richard Schweid is a writer and journalist who has published books about such disparate subjects as homeless families; home health care aides in the Bronx; eels; hot peppers; cockroaches; and cars in Cuba. A native of Nashville, he lives between coastal Rhode Island and Barcelona, Spain. He received the 2024 Silvers Grant for his forthcoming book, The Octopus Farm (University of North Carolina Press).
Nina Ellis
Nina Ellis is a writer based in Cairo, Egypt. She is the first biographer of the short story writer Lucia Berlin, and her doctorate at the University of Cambridge was the first piece of extended scholarship on Berlin’s work. Nina’s short fiction, nonfiction and travel writing have appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, The Idaho Review and other publications. She won an Editors’ Choice Award in the 2021 Raymond Carver Short Story Contest, and she was awarded the 2023 Chip Bishop Fellowship by the Biographers International Organization. She received a 2024 Silvers Grant for her forthcoming book, Looking for Lucia: A Biography in Motion (FSG).
Joshua Gamson
Joshua Gamson is the author of Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America; Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity; The Fabulous Sylvester: The Legend, the Music, the 70s in San Francisco; and Modern Families: Stories of Extraordinary Journeys to Kinship (2015), and has written widely about social movements, sexualities, and contemporary culture for a variety of publications. He is Professor of Sociology at the University of San Francisco. He received a 2024 Silvers Grant for his forthcoming book, The Ballad of Teena Marie: Life, Music, and Soul Across the American Color Line (Simon & Schuster).
Frederic Wehrey
Frederic Wehrey is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, The New York Times, The Atlantic, TIME magazine, Foreign Affairs, and other publications. He is currently completing a book on Ethiopia’s resistance to fascist colonialism, to be published by W.W. Norton in 2025. He holds a doctorate in international relations from the University of Oxford. He received a 2024 Silvers Grant for his forthcoming book, African Zion: Ethiopia’s War Against Fascism (WW Norton).
Ryan Devereaux
Ryan Devereaux is an award-winning investigative journalist and Type Media Center fellow. He received a 2024 Silvers Grant for a forthcoming book for Avid Reader Press which examines the collision of politics, polarization, and special interests that fueled the deadliest wolf hunt in the history of Yellowstone National Park. He is based in Tucson, Arizona, USA, and his twitter handle is @rdevro.