Sarah Stillman | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1984 (age 39–40) |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Language | English |
| Education | Georgetown Day School |
| Alma mater | Yale University, Oxford University |
| Notable awards | George Polk Award (2012), Hillman Prize (2012), MacArthur Fellow (2016), Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting (2024) |
Sarah Stillman is an American professor, staff writer at The New Yorker magazine,[1] and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist focusing on immigration policy,[2] the criminal justice system,[3] and the impacts of climate change on workers.[4] Stillman won a National Magazine Award in 2012 for her reporting from Iraq and Afghanistan and again in 2019 for her article in The New Yorker on deportation as a death sentence.[5] She won a 2012 George Polk Award for her reporting on the high-risk use of young people as confidential informants in the war on drugs,[6][7] and a second Polk Award in 2021 for coverage of migrant workers and climate change.[8] She also won the 2012 Hillman Prize.[9] In 2016, she was named a MacArthur Fellow.[10] She won a 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for her coverage in The New Yorker[11] about troubling injustices in felony murder prosecutions in the U.S.
Her investigative reporting has shed light on profiteering in key areas of U.S. life, particularly prisons and jails;[12] immigration detention facilities;[13] disaster recovery programs; and U.S. war zone contracting.[14] 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.[15]
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.[16] Stillman also teaches narrative non-fiction at Yale University's English Department.[15]
In 2016, Stillman became founding director of the Global Migration Program 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.[17]
The rights to a number of her articles in The New Yorker have been sold to Hollywood filmmakers and studios, including her story on confidential informants, which was acquired in 2014 by Paramount Pictures and Oscar-winning writer/producer William Monahan.[18]
Stillman was elected in 2020 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which includes “world leaders in the arts and sciences, business, philanthropy, and public affairs … who promote nonpartisan recommendations that advance the public good.”[19]