The 2023 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant

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The Whiting Foundation recognizes that works of deeply researched and imaginatively composed nonfiction are essential to our culture but come into being at great cost to writers in time and resources.

The Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant of $40,000 is awarded to writers in the process of completing a work of nonfiction to the highest aesthetic and intellectual level to be published in Canada, the United Kingdom, or the United States. It is intended to encourage original and ambitious projects by giving grantees the additional means to do exacting research and devote time to composition.

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Nicholas Boggs

James Baldwin: A Love Story Forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux (US) Literary Biography

Judges’ citation:

The project:

There can never be enough written on James Baldwin, and this biography, with its brilliant original research, plot twists, and pageturning pace, may be the best yet. Dedicated and driven, Nicholas Boggs is clearly the expert on his subject. A spellbinding narrative that will magnify our understanding of one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century, whose contributions only continue to grow in influence.

Drawing on extensive archival material newly brought to light by the author, James Baldwin: A Love Story tells the overlapping stories of Baldwin’s most sustaining intimate and artistic relationships: with his mentor, Black American painter Beauford Delaney; his lover and muse, Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger; and his collaborators, famed Turkish actor Engin Cezzar and iconoclastic French artist Yoran Cazac.

For the first time, this biography shows how Baldwin drew on complex structures within these relationships—geographical, cultural, political, aesthetic, and erotic—and alchemized them into art that spoke truth to power and had an indelible impact on the civil rights movement and Black and queer literary history.

Nicholas Boggs is a writer and researcher who recovered and co-edited a new edition of James Baldwin’s out-of-print collaboration with French artist Yoran Cazac, Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood. His work has been supported by fellowships from the Leon Levy Center for Biography, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Beinecke Library and Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale, the Scholars-in-Residence Program at the Schomburg, as well as residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell. He lives in Brooklyn.

The unexpected arrival of Lucien Happersberger in Paris in September—”au bout des nerfs,” as Baldwin wrote to Mary Painter in a detailed letter that moves gracefully, even seamlessly, from a lengthy reflection on their relationship to its impact on his writing—only added to Baldwin’s continued personal confusion.

The two weeks spent with Lucien in Paris were their own “great strain,” primarily because the visit included “three or four days of drinking with him, and dealing with him at his outrageous, sorrowful, blind, loud-talking, moving, and exasperating worst. Now it’s I who am au bout des nerfs.” Even when Baldwin was able to get Lucien out of Paris and back to Clamart, the mayhem continued unabated. “I cleaned up the house,” Baldwin’s account continued, “sent Lucien to the store, and laid down, congratulating myself on the imminent orgy of work and quiet.” But it was only “an hour or so later, moved by some not too obscure premonition,” that Baldwin made his way to the corner tabac where he found Lucien with “six people, all strangers, all younger than I, and none very attractive, with whom he had been drinking since he left the house, and whom he had just invited to dinner.” Recalling the many arguments he’d had in public with his ex-lover Arnold, Baldwin had done his best to keep his cool and agreed to have them over. Predictably, this did not go well: “So—there we were, they were all horrible, and I threw them all out. Or, rather, got them all to the bus station on the corner, where the youngest boy promptly took off all his clothes, and declared himself in love with me.”

All of this was a massive distraction. “I know that I haven’t begun to work yet,” Baldwin wrote, explaining the fallout from Lucien’s antics. “Now, in the years that are left, I’ve got to prove that I’m a writer. I’ve got to become the writer I know I am. And—can I do it? I even ask myself, sometimes, ‘Is it worth it? What’s it for? Who cares?’” He was referring, of course, to Another Country, a manuscript so long in progress but with no real end in sight and on which he was pinning his reputation and his future as a novelist. “And it seems to me,” he lamented, using precisely the kinds of terms some critics would level at the novel when it was finally published in 1962, “that my style is becoming more erratic, unmanageable, and clumsily loaded than ever—what wouldn’t I give to be able to write a straight, straightforward, declarative sentence, free of qualifications, flourishes, and asides!—like Tolstoi, or Dostoyevsky, or, even, Dickens.”

Eiren Caffall

The Mourner’s Bestiary Forthcoming from Row House Publishing (US) Science/Memoir

Judges’ citation:

The project:

Beguiling, idiosyncratic: Eiren Caffall makes an original contribution to the growing genre of memoirs that explore illness and healing.

The Mourner’s Bestiary draws a poetic parallel between the body’s experience of chronic disease and the marine ecosystems Caffall knows well—an unexpected juxtaposition that gives new dimension to climate hazards we face and opportunities to address them. Caffall writes with plangent intensity about our responsibility toward the planet, and her eye for the wonder and beauty of ocean life pierces the illusion of disconnected existence. Water becomes an element that draws us together.

The Mourner’s Bestiary is a meditation on grief and survival told through the stories of animals in two collapsing marine ecosystems—the Gulf of Maine and the Long Island Sound—and the lives of a family facing a life-threatening illness on their shores. The Gulf of Maine is the world’s fastest-warming marine ecosystem, and the Long Island Sound has been the site of conservation battles that predict the fights ahead for the Gulf. Eiren Caffall carries a family legacy of two hundred years of genetic kidney disease, raising a child who may also. The Mourner’s Bestiary braids environmental research with a memoir of generational healing, and the work it takes to get there for the human and animal lives caught in tides of loss.

Eiren Caffall is a writer and musician based in Chicago. Her writing has appeared in Guernica, Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, Al Jazeera, and The Rumpus, and she has recorded three albums. Her film Becoming Ocean screened at national and international film festivals. She received a Social Justice News Nexus fellowship in environmental journalism at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, and has had residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Millay Colony, Hedgebrook, and Ragdale.

The longfin inshore squid is not under threat in a warming world. New residents of the Gulf of Maine and the Long Island Sound, they are abundant enough and unique enough in their body plan to be excellent subjects for scientific testing. Humans and modern cephalopods share a common ancestor and the results of ancestral innovations. Ancient cephalopods pioneered the neuron, that single genetic adaptation that allows creatures, squid and human alike, to think and feel. These neurons hold the key to understanding fear.

Human and squid neurons share structural features, including how they translate impulses in the brain into action. Neurons have three parts—the cell body, the dendrites, and the axon. The axon is the thread that connects the impulses of the dendrites, through the cell body, to the destination of the impulse, either inches away in the brain, or down the body to the feet. When the neuron tells you to run from danger, it is the axon that delivers the news.

Longfin squid have one of the largest neural axons relative to their body size of any creature.

While a single human axon cannot be removed from the brain for study—being impossibly slim—the squid neuron can be manually removed and placed under a powerful microscope to track how electrical impulses move.

Discoveries from the study of longfin axons have been awarded Nobel prizes, making possible research that may lead to cures for Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s. Without the longfin squid, we would not understand the specific way in which messages of fear, or any other emotion, flow through the human body.

The waters around us that night on Monhegan Island teemed with new messengers of emotion in a time when we are all overwhelmed with worry for the natural world. The waters were warmer, the squid was evidence, time was precious. The peace of the island was giving way for me. The squid made me worry for the Gulf as dark came down, and with it came another worry for my son. If generations of animals were threatened in the face of warming seas, my own generational project of family was threatened by polycystic kidney disease. I knew Dex was inheriting a warming ocean; I still had no idea if he had inherited my illness.

I had fought against generations of fear to decide to have Dex. His birth came with a 50/50 chance I would pass on what killed his ancestors, what was killing me. Only my father, of all his siblings, had a biological child. By the time I was conceived, he thought he’d dodged the disease, only to find out the year after I was born that he hadn’t. His brother and sister had no children and his other brother had adopted, all to stop our genetic illness from coming for the next generation. In choosing to conceive, I’d reached forward in time towards healing, backward in time to soothe mourning that has accompanied a legacy of loss and interrupted future.

Sarah Chihaya

Bibliophobia Forthcoming from Random House (US) Literary Criticism/Memoir

Judges’ citation:

The project:

Soul-baring, witty, and slyly provocative, Bibliophobia unsettles our most widespread and unexamined beliefs about books and reading. Sarah Chihaya coaxes us to consider how literature can be both our salvation and our peril, and whether it’s possible—or desirable—to read without extracting meaning or reinforcing narrative expectations. Chihaya offers up an intimate and sharply observant account of how she learned to embrace the hazards and joys that come with reading, and of the dangers she’s faced in a life among books.

Bibliophobia is a personal history of reading, writing, and depression, both a memoir told through literary criticism and a manifesto that aims to trouble the facile discourse of loving— and implicitly feeling loved by—literature that circulates through public imagination.

Bibliophobia tangles with arguments for the importance of literature that frame reading fiction as a means of leading us away from brokenness, calling attention to the fact that the most difficult, challenging, and painful books we encounter often end up shaping our intellectual and emotional lives the most powerfully.

Sarah Chihaya is a book critic, essayist, and editor. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, and The Yale Review, among other places, and she is the co-author of The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism. She has taught at Princeton University, New York University, and UC Berkeley. She is currently a contributing editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and lives in Brooklyn.

For a long time, I felt safe letting books tell me what to do or think or feel. Fiction was my thing. I loved more than anything to be an invisible inhabitant of someone else’s world; always the unobserved observer, not the protagonist. I wasn’t interested in identifying with characters, though I did have a version of that fan fiction impulse that so many absorbed readers have. I could imagine myself as a bit player, woven cleverly into the subplots of the narrative, but rarely anyone I actually met in a book, and certainly never the main characters.

The first time I read Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which follows the most minor of characters as they navigate the periphery of Hamlet, it made perfect sense to me.

This thought experiment in becoming part of the background was perhaps my first and best education in understanding narrative. It’s actually very difficult to become part of a world, but not one of its shapers; identifying with the heroine, I have to imagine, involves a brash belief in one’s own agency, and a confidence that the story will hew itself to your desires and decisions. Writing yourself into the apocrypha, however, is a delicate operation that demands a constant diplomatic negotiation with the forces of attention, structure, and plot that shape the novel as a whole. Becoming incidental such that you can stay unobtrusively inside a book without accidentally blundering around and destroying everything that makes you love it is harder than it seems. I loved dwelling inside a book, and figuring out different ways to stay there longer—as Leah Price writes, “while many people I knew wanted to have read books, I never wanted to get over the delicious moment of being in the middle of reading them.” Price makes a fine and necessary distinction here: there are many pragmatic reasons for wanting “to have read books,” but wanting to stay “in the middle” of them connotes a more complicated set of desires.

A third category could be added here: the cultural phenomenon Jessica Pressman calls “bookishness,” a term that refers not only to someone’s predilection for reading, but also “an identity derived from a physical nearness to books, not just from the ‘reading’ of them in the conventional sense.” As a reader, both professionally and personally, I’ve primarily operated in the second mode—the in medias res quality of reading. I’ve also certainly “wanted to have read books” at various times, whether in a seminar for which I was unprepared, or nodding vaguely at someone who optimistically assumes that I must have read this or that classic. But I have very rarely, if ever, felt an affinity for the book-centric culture Pressman describes so compellingly. If anything, the longer I live a life among books—always surrounded, menaced by them on all sides—the more I feel an active, oddly personal enmity towards the figure of the bibliophile, whether in the contemporary fetishizations of the physical body of the book that Pressman evokes, or even in the gentle meditations of Walter Benjamin, forever unpacking his precious library.

Alexander Clapp

Waste Wars: A Journey Through the World of Globalized Trash Forthcoming from Little, Brown & Company (US) Environmental Reportage

Judges’ citation:

The project:

A visceral, jaw-dropping inquiry into a vital climate vulnerability—”our planet’s runaway garbage pandemic”—that is easy to ignore but implicates us all. Alexander Clapp blends impressive on-the-ground reporting with strong narrative drive, a lively turn of phrase, and gripping characters. In this plunge into the often corrupt world of modern manufacture, consumption, and destruction, Clapp takes extraordinary personal risks to explore places on the planet where few wish to go, or want to acknowledge.

Much of what the world has thrown away for the past forty years—plastic water bottles, cell phones, rubber tires—has had a highly profitable and environmentally devastating second life, getting bartered, trafficked, and offloaded to the poorest places on Earth.

Waste Wars is an exposé of this business: how it began, how it destroys the environment, and—most importantly—the international rivalries it has brewed and continues to brew between the “developed” and “developing” worlds.

Alexander Clapp is a journalist based in Athens, Greece. He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books, The New York Times, and The Economist, among other publications.

The dirt ribbon of track plods deeper into the peninsula in Accra’s Korle Lagoon, beyond the smartphone dismantling stations, towards more complicated technological autopsies. Some fifteen feet across, the path is an unrelenting vehicular quagmire, juddering with motorized tricycles and pickup trucks and retrofitted tractors and choking with their commingling exhausts. Every morning, they ferry hundreds of tons of mangled appliances—ceiling fans, washing machines, motorcycle engines, refrigerators—into Agbogbloshie, a vast scrapyard and slum home to some 40,000 Ghanaians; every afternoon they motor some of the world’s most precious materials—cobalt, copper wiring, gold—out, a ten-hour turnaround that extracts valuable material and leaves little behind save a hazy mass of pollution. My feet crunch over shards of computer-screen glass and cracked iPad covers and stray Hewlett Packard mice; a pink bra has been stamped into the mud by so many thousands of footsteps that it resembles a fossilized crustacean.

Itinerant barbers bearing white plastic stools roam around doling out buzzcuts for ten cedis, or a buck. Women shimmering in tribal dress meander through the morass, selling juices out of plastic laundry bins. The constant clank of hammers laying into electronics pulses across the slum like a heartbeat. Clank! Clank!

About halfway down the peninsula, the appliances that have arrived on those motorized tricycles and pickup trucks are being broken down into pieces. Hundreds of young men— known in Agbogbloshie as the “dismantlers”—sit in circles straddling gutted microwaves and computer monitors. Most are wearing knee-length colored dress socks and open-toed sandals, which poke out of great rats’ nests of electrical wiring. The dismantlers have one job: for eight to nine hours a day they pound their fat gavel hammers into old ceiling fans, motorcycle mufflers, speaker systems. The work has a factory-line monotony to it, only it is the exact opposite of assembling. It is a de-manufacturing line, reducing all the amenities of our modern world—the air conditioners that keep us cool, the refrigerators that preserve our food, the motors of the lawnmowers that cut our grass—back into their constituent elements. The juxtaposition never ceases to be jarring: the work of the dismantlers may be pre-industrial and backbreaking, but what lies beneath the strokes of their hammers is some of the world’s most advanced technology. And while streamlined automation might have manufactured these products, human labor remains the most efficient way to get rid of it.

Kendra Taira Field

The Stories We Tell Forthcoming from W.W. Norton (US) History/Memoir

Judges’ citation:

The project:

A crucial rethinking of the meanings of genealogy, with all the makings of a tour de force. This is a major study of the Black past in America and how African Americans have approached their history and its lacunae, via fiction and silence as well as memory and historical record. Kendra Taira Field approaches rarely discussed material with scholarly thoroughness and a fluid, intimate style that is touched with gravitas. The Stories We Tell has the potential to quietly transform the cultural conversation around family history: who makes it, who it belongs to, and what purpose it can serve.

The Stories We Tell traces the history of African American genealogy and family storytelling from the Middle Passage to the present. It is about the painstaking efforts of generations of African Americans to access and share their familial pasts; how these efforts were shaped by the history of slavery, emancipation, segregation, and civil rights struggle; and how these efforts, in turn, shaped American history. It investigates and celebrates where millions of African descent went—aesthetically, creatively, and when others were not listening—to make meaning of their familial past.

Dr. Kendra Taira Field is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Tufts University. Field is the author of Growing Up with the Country and the co-founder of the African American Trail Project and the Du Bois Forum, a retreat for writers, scholars, and artists. She co-curated the inaugural exhibition of the National Women’s History Museum and serves as Chief Historian for the 10 Million Names Project. She lives in Boston.

One day in the summer of 1871, fifteen years prior to Du Bois’s arrival at Fisk University, several students knocked on the sitting room door of school president Adam K. Spence. Like many Fisk students at the time, these young people had been enslaved as children and were part of the first generation of African Americans who came of age after emancipation. The small group of students asked Spence for permission to shut and lock the door, before drawing the curtains and sitting on his wooden floor. Then, Spence recalled, “as if a thing they were ashamed of,” the students opened their mouths and quietly began to sing. The songs they sang would soon become known across the United States and Europe as “Jubilee songs”—and the students as Fisk’s first class of Jubilee Singers. One of the students was twenty-year-old Ella Sheppard. Born enslaved in Mississippi and separated from her mother as a toddler, Sheppard would soon become assistant music instructor at the school.

But Sheppard never intended to sing those songs. “The slave songs,” she stated decades later, “were never used by us then in public.” Sheppard remembered how they “finally grew willing to sing them privately.” They would return to the sitting room time and again in the coming weeks. Sitting on the floor, Sheppard said, the singers “practiced softly, learning from each other the songs of [their] fathers.” Although the spirituals would eventually become the mainstay of their performances—this was the repertoire I heard myself when my cousin Phillipa Kay became a Fisk Jubilee Singer in the 1980s—in the early days of touring, the Jubilee Singers instead performed European standards. “The slave songs were associated with slavery and the dark past,” Sheppard later recalled, and “represented the things to be forgotten.” She added, “Then, too, they were sacred to our parents who used them in their religious worship”—signaling the existence of a private realm of historical memory. In this spirit, historian Darlene Clark Hine has noted the many dimensions of our past that African American women of the post-emancipation era “believed better left unknown, unwritten, and unspoken except in whispered tones.”

In the decades following emancipation, even as freedpeople placed thousands of newspaper ads for family members separated by the slave trade, some “tested their freedom” in ways that shaped family histories and genealogies for generations to come—taking on new names and relations, cultivating particular family stories, while allowing other stories, and relations, to fade.

As early as 1845, Frederick Douglass had written that the songs of his enslaved brethren “told a tale of woe.” The sorrow songs became a conduit, a repository, and a memorial to family and family history lost to the trade. Decades later, Du Bois called the songs “the music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing towards a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways.” Fisk graduate John Wesley Work II, whose father had been enslaved, echoed that these songs were the “personal concern” of enslaved women and men. “When the Negro found himself free,” Work wrote, “he literally put his past behind him.” At least publicly.

Molly O’Toole

The Route: The Untold Story of the New Migrant Underground Forthcoming from Crown (US) Investigative Reportage

Judges’ citation:

The project:

The ambition and drive of this reporter takes one’s breath away. Molly O’Toole travels alongside refugees from countries such as Cameroon, Congo, Nepal, and Pakistan as they make their uncertain way toward security, and reports on the lucrative black market in human smuggling and the international attempts to police it. A powerful, gymnastic writing style makes room for nuanced context and analysis, and puts an intimate face on the global refugee crisis.

Refreshing in its originality, bold in its scope, it stands to make a seismic contribution to the immigration debate.

The Route is an immersive narrative tracing a major new migrant underground. This deadly gauntlet draws refugees from around the world to begin a hazardous trek from Brazil to the US-Mexico border, carved out by the fixers, forgers, officials, and smugglers cashing in on a billion-dollar, globe-spanning black market and held together by the thread of the American dream.

Molly O’Toole was until recently an immigration and security reporter for The Los Angeles Times, as well as a fellow at George Washington University and Distinguished Visiting Journalist at Cornell University. O’Toole has covered migration and security for Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, the Associated Press and others. She was awarded the first-ever Pulitzer Prize in audio in 2020 along with the staff of This American Life and Emily Green, and has been recognized by the Livingston Awards and National Press Club. She is based in Washington, DC.

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday—every day of the week except Sunday—Ethiopian Airlines Flight 506 leaves Addis Ababa Bole Airport, with a scheduled 9:50 a.m. departure. Covering more than 6,000 miles, ET 506 lands roughly 12 hours later at São Paulo Guarulhos International Airport.

Officially speaking, ET 506 originates in Ethiopia and ends in Brazil. Yet for those who know—and they number in the thousands—ET 506’s final stop is, in fact, 9,000 miles north.

For many of its passengers, hailing from practically every country on the planet, ET 506’s true destination is the United States.

When ET 506 appears on the board, a buzz begins at Guarulhos Airport, tucked into the outer edges of São Paulo’s sprawl. Inside the shiny terminal, people start to line up outside the glass automatic doors, awaiting the arrivals. But many of the passengers don’t hesitate when they step out of the doors with a swish. As previously instructed by their local agents, who sent them onward from the regional nexus of Mumbai, Dubai, Istanbul, Nairobi, Lagos, even Moscow, they shoulder their backpack or grip their rolling suitcase and immediately turn right, heading toward the far side of the terminal, to the federal police office conveniently located right inside the airport.

Just a few steps on, they pass the Starbucks where the smugglers wait. Well-dressed men with big gold watches and chunky chains around thick necks type away on smartphones at the cafe tables until their clients emerge from the office. Typically, the smugglers are not Brazilian, at least not by birth. Like ET 506’s primary passengers, they too are Arab, Asian, African. Months or years ago, they too boarded ET 506, lured by its promise. A plane flight becomes a password, a prayer, the key to a locked door. Once through it, they decided to stay in Brazil and get in on the big business of moving human beings north. The smuggled become the smugglers.

At the Starbucks, the agents usually don’t have to wait long. Right there at the airport office, arrivals can request asylum with federal officials and receive a temporary document that allows them to legally stay in Brazil while their request winds its way through a longer adjudication process. That temporary document, the “refugee protocol,” also allows them to obtain a national ID number, which serves as a work permit and grants access to public health services and schools. Many of the applicants don’t intend to stay in Brazil, but registering helps smooth their forward journey to the next country on the route to the US-Mexico border. Peru lies a mere 2,000-plus miles away, overland. But they’re not on their way just yet.

First, the handoff. When a newly-arrived traveler exits the federal office and approaches the Starbucks tables, the smuggler stands and holds his cell-phone screen outward, greeting the client with his own reflection. This selfie the client took back home serves as a guarantee, a receipt, a safeguard to know which is his agent, the next node in the network, the true span of which most have hardly fathomed. It’s how they know who to trust. Or so they are told.

Dom Phillips with collaborators

How to Save the Amazon: Ask the People Who Know Forthcoming from Manilla Press, an imprint of Bonnier Books UK Ltd Environmental Reportage

Judges’ citation:

The project:

Dom Phillips’s reporting on ecological depredations in the Amazon, completed before his murder in the field, demonstrates impressive levels of access and a deep moral curiosity. It’s rare to encounter travel writing that truly shows the reader something they haven’t seen before; the sense of discovery—and, inevitably, peril—is palpable. It is galvanizing to see this cohort of investigative journalists come together to deliver on Phillips’s vision, and, crucially, to include first-hand indigenous perspectives and their potential solutions. This project speaks not only to the threatened territory of the Amazon but the vulnerable territory of freedom of speech.

In June 2022, Dom Phillips was shot dead with environmentalist Bruno Pereira while on his final research trip for How to Save the Amazon, a deeply reported, characterdriven travel book on the destruction faced by the world’s most important rainforest.

Recognizing the significance of this project, leading writers covering the Amazon have come together to finish Phillips’s book.

The group includes Jon Lee Anderson (The New Yorker), Eliane Brum (author and cofounder of Sumaúma), Andrew Fishman (The Intercept Brazil), Tom Phillips (Latin America correspondent for the Guardian) and Davi Kopenawa Yanomami (author of The Falling Sky), and is helmed by journalist Jonathan Watts. This collaborative project will honor Phillips’s vision and his memory, offer up potential solutions that incorporate indigenous voices and experience, and insist that journalists will not be silenced.

British journalist Dom Phillips (1964-2022) was awarded an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship in 2021. He was also the 2021 Cissy Patterson Environmental Fellow. His work was included by Greenpeace’s Unearthed in its Best Environmental Journalism. Phillips was a regular contributor to the Guardian, and his coverage with Reporter Brasil of the 2019 Amazon “Fire Day’’ was nominated for the Gabo Prize, Latin America’s premier journalism award.

Elias Barros da Silva put on a wide-brimmed straw hat and led the way down the hill to show us a big, fenced-off area near a pond full of high, skinny trees and luxuriant foliage. Once pasture, it had been overtaken by the rough undergrowth people here called junqueira. First Elias sowed more grass for cattle. Then he planted trees. Now it was beginning to look like a forest again, and Elias, with his shy smile and gentle demeanor, was quietly proud of it.

He listed the trees—including andiroba, mahogany, amarelão, and jatobá—that now grew there, while fingering the blade of his machete. “There are many species here,” he said.

Beside it was his agroforestry patch, a small plantation full of fruit trees. “There is a spring, just there,” he said.

We sat on a log in the waning afternoon sun. Now in his late 30s, Elias was the youngest of seven children and was a toddler when his father Raimundo abandoned his young family.

Elias had never met his father. For three years Elias processed charcoal in intense heat in round earthen huts. Not that far from Marabá there was a highly pollutant pig iron industry that depended on the fuel. “Charcoal brought in a lot of money,” Elias said. He carried on producing it after he bought 15 hectares from his father-in-law, even though, in effect, this meant he and others were burning their own forest. “Things were always being done that were wrong,” he said.

In 2009, under the Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Deforestation, a major police operation called Arc of Fire targeted the region. Elias and his charcoal colleagues resolved to cut their losses. “We decided to invest in agriculture and raising cattle,” he said. Now he was selling his bananas from quality seedlings provided by Brazil’s agro-tech research organization, Embrapa, and planned to keep the cattle for their cheese and milk.

“It’s a very secure source of income,” he said. We finished the afternoon on the shady terrace of his simple breeze-block house, overlooking the earthen yard. Elias served hot, sweet coffee in a flask and slices of his renowned home-made cheese—rich, salty, delicious.

As Elias talked about his fruit trees, it seemed that here the wheel was beginning to turn a little, that some who cleared the forest were willing to start reversing that process—provided they could get help to do so and still produce enough to live on. It looked to me like a little success story, a ray of hope glinting off the açaí palms, in a region that desperately needs them.

On the highway back to Marabá, I passed fires burning on the side of the highway, fires like those that increasingly rage through the Amazon in dry seasons when farmers clear forest. Flames crackled and smoke billowed on dry scrub and undergrowth. Nobody paid any heed as cars and trucks hurtled past.

Carrie Schuettpelz

The Indian Card: A Journey Through America’s Native Identity Problem Forthcoming from Flatiron Books (US) History/Reportage

Judges’ citation:

The project:

A candid, unflinching look at the sometimes subtle, sometimes ruthless ways federal policies undermine Indigenous culture and society. Carrie Schuettpelz understands firsthand how official tribal membership rations not only access to benefits such as healthcare and housing stipends, but also an ineffable sense of belonging. Her thorough excavation of the painful history that gave rise to rigid enrollment policies is a courageous gift to our understanding of contemporary Native life. To her engagingly direct voice and assured scholarship she adds a mighty resource: a data set of enrollment criteria in the 347 federally recognized tribes in the contiguous United States. This is groundbreaking work driven by curiosity, rigor, and high personal stakes.

The Indian Card is about what happens when rules around Native identity—many of which were created by a US government intent on wiping out Native people altogether—inhibit Native people from creating successful, sustainable communities. This issue is of urgent importance in Indian Country, and has broad implications for diversity in the US. The Indian Card tackles it head-on through personal narrative, interviews with Native people from around the country, historical interludes, and data deep-dives, addressing what animates the implicit question of who is or is not “Native enough.”

Carrie Schuettpelz is an Associate Professor at the University of Iowa, where she also serves as the Vice President of the Native American Council. She is an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe. Prior to receiving her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she spent seven years working as a policy advisor in the Obama Administration, focusing on homelessness and tribal policy. She holds a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard University and was a Fulbright Scholar in Denmark. She lives in Iowa with her husband and two children.

I imagine that the width of the chasm between claiming Native identity and being formally verified as having it feels different for each person who approaches it. Some may not notice its existence at all. They’ve been told, for example, that their great-great-great grandmother was a Cherokee princess, and so they dutifully check the Indian box whenever they get the chance. It’s a mere transaction. Maybe they don’t even know that the concept of enrollment exists.

For others, like Jonathan Buffalo, this gap is probably more akin to a fiery pit, flames whipping his face each time he gets close enough to peer over its edge. He’s known about this chasm his entire life, of course; it’s difficult to ignore, and impossible to cross. His father wasn’t Native. And, in Jonathan Buffalo’s tribe, only people with Native fathers can enroll.

For me, the gap seems to change shape every time I approach it. Sure, I’m enrolled in a tribe. I have an Indian Card—a wallet-size piece of plastic—that proclaims it so. And, yes, ownership of this card makes me feel validated in ways that I’m still trying to unpack in therapy. But I did not grow up surrounded by my Native community, on a reservation or otherwise. I am, mostly, white-passing. My last name is an amalgamation of German consonants that I’m told translates loosely as something about fur. The one-quarter of Indian “blood” that I possess could just as easily be stated as the reverse equation—I am three-quarters German, too.

Rationally, of course, I know that this isn’t how it works. Every person carries multiple identities. Some might even carry them like me—rattling around inside them like breakables on a flimsy shelf. And I know that blood cannot be divided into fractions like an apple— clean-cut and cored; separate and distinct pieces of a whole.

But the validation; the evidence: I can’t shake the feeling that this is unique to Native people. That we, uniquely, have been forced into needing to constantly prove our identities to ourselves and others. I can’t unsee the injustices for people like Jonathan Buffalo, who cannot clear the final hurdle of his own identity because of the “evidence” required.

Sonia Shah

Special: The Rise and Fall of a Beastly Idea Forthcoming from Bloomsbury (US) History/Science

Judges’ citation:

The project:

Sonia Shah reveals the invisible wall that humans have constructed between animals and ourselves, and begins the essential work of dismantling it. This author has researched well and long: delving into classic texts of philosophy, history, and the sciences, she reframes our understanding with elegance and originality, posing thought-provoking questions bolstered by scholarship. This is the first book on human exceptionalism with such scope and ambition, and the writing is superb. Timely and urgent, it calls for a sea change in how human society regards itself.

Western industrial society’s foundational idea that Homo sapiens is special—separated from all other species by unique cognitive, technological, and communicative capacities—faces a new reckoning. Even as our technology grapples with existential threats of our own making, scientists are discovering nonhuman capacities that match or exceed our own, from coral polyps that can hear their reefs to crows that understand recursive logic. Special traces how human exceptionalism shapes our world and how its collapse might transform science, medicine, history, and our ideas about ourselves, our fellow creatures, and our common future.

Sonia Shah is a science journalist with bylines in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and other venues, and the author of five books, including The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move, a finalist for the 2021 PEN/E. O. Wilson Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, and Pandemic: Tracking Contagions from Cholera to Coronaviruses and Beyond, a finalist for the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Science. She lives in Baltimore.

According to public intellectuals from the historian Yuval Noah Harari to the linguist Steven Pinker, our unique cognitive capacities “set us apart from all other beasts,” forming a “boundless chasm” that can “never be fully bridged,” as the anthropologist Brian Fagan put it. And yet, the qualities that have been offered as evidence of our exceptionalism in nature have all been discovered in other non-human species. Scientists have discovered the self-awareness of fish and the elaborate underground communication networks of trees. They’ve uncovered a scale and complexity in the movement patterns of insects and birds that can only be explained by a collective intelligence that exceeds our own. They’ve discovered that nonhuman species, like us, create culture—and by extension, could be forgotten agents of history too. “Every single individual has its own knowledge, personality, history, and when that single individual is leading a troop, it’s like a culture,” notes one biologist. “The more we study, the more we find it is a matter of wildlife in general.”

As dozens of species blink out on a daily basis, a new animism emerges. In medicine, experts redefine the health of the human body as intimately connected to the health of the bodies of non-human animals. Historians proclaim that “non-humans co-produce political history,” and rewrite stories of the past to incorporate the agency of non-humans. Linguists expand the study of language beyond human communication to include birdsong.

The transformations precipitated by the collapse of human exceptionalism could be “seismic,” as the environmental historian Daniel Vandersommers put it. Historical narratives that expand to include the agency of non-human beings could be more disruptive to our ideas about the past than the stories of women, working people, and colonized subjects were to the histories inscribed by kings, conquerors, and patriarchs. Public awareness of the consciousness of non-human beings, from corvids to cephalopods, with their own subjective experiences could provoke a radical sense of solidarity with the non-human world, adding new urgency to the crisis of mass extinction. We stand to lose not just “biodiversity” as a faceless natural resource, but companion minds making meaning of our shared world.

Reggie Ugwu

Brilliance Is All We Have: Black Filmmakers and the Fight for the Soul of America Forthcoming from Bloomsbury (US) Biography/Cultural Criticism

Judges’ citation:

The project:

Reggie Ugwu’s Brilliance Is All We Have dramatizes the story of Black filmmaking and shows how it is also the story of race in America, with its progress and reversals.

Ugwu makes an important historical intervention by connecting the early history of Black filmmaking to more recent developments, celebrating exceptional achievement, and mapping Black networks in the industry. Richly detailed narrative outstrips limitations of the profile form by contextualizing notable figures’ struggles and triumphs, all delivered in Ugwu’s snazzy prose. A long overdue book, both vital and necessary.

Brilliance Is All We Have is a narrative history of Black filmmakers and Black self-definition in American cinema. Through deep reportage and research, it weaves together intimate, character-driven accounts of the construction of Black-American identity and the American idea in film after emancipation, from Oscar Micheaux in the era the medium was born, through the journeys of groundbreaking 21st century filmmakers including Barry Jenkins, Ava DuVernay, and Jordan Peele.

Reggie Ugwu is a culture reporter on staff for The New York Times whose work has been selected as a finalist for the Los Angeles Press Club Awards and anthologized in Best American Travel Writing.

He earned a degree in journalism from The University of Texas at Austin. Originally from Houston, TX, he lives in Brooklyn.

The smell of bacon greeted Barry Jenkins at the Laxton house in San Francisco. He had moved from the makeshift bed under their stairs to a sublet in the Mission but still had the key. A two-bedroom apartment in the basement, recently vacated by James Laxton’s younger brother, served as official lodging for the crew of Medicine for Melancholy. When Jenkins could get the morning off from Banana Republic, he biked over to the Laxtons’ to plan the day’s shoot and fuel up on free breakfast and coffee. Laxton’s parents were movie people— his mother, Aggie Rodgers, was a costume designer who worked on Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Beetlejuice, and The Color Purple, for which she received an Academy Award nomination— and understood the particular poverty of a self-funded film shoot.

It was early November and the final stretch of shooting. Only a handful of tricky scenes remained. He hoped to have the film in the can by December 1st—the submissions deadline for the South by Southwest film festival. SXSW had recently distinguished itself as the epicenter of Mumblecore, an emerging American independent film movement championed by an online community of bloggers and critics. Like similar movements, Mumblecore had no formal definition or membership criteria but loosely described a number of aesthetically related films produced in roughly the same time period. The Mumblecore aesthetic was defined as much by what it wasn’t as what it was: understated, not spectacular; incidental rather than plot-driven; handcrafted rather than mass-produced. These were low-stakes dramas and comedies of manners, about pursuing a crush, as in Andrew Bujalski’s Funny Ha Ha, or going on a road trip, as in Mark and Jay Duplass’s The Puffy Chair, or intimacy in the internet age, as in Joe Swanberg’s LOL. Their protagonists—typically young, middle-class white people—were at a point in life that made them susceptible to what the writer Dennis Lim described in The New York Times as “quietly seismic shifts that are apparent only in hindsight.” The performers, often first-time actors or friends of the filmmaker, seemed to be playing lightly fictionalized versions of themselves. Critics often described the movies as the antithesis of the superhero pics and franchise byproducts that dominated at the box office: microbudget, gently bent films whose charm lay in their recognizable humanity.

Jenkins had read about Mumblecore with envy. He thought the name had it backwards— as with his beloved French New Wave, what had made these films successful was the clarity of the author’s voice. It energized him to see his generational peers making personal art and finding an audience. He wanted to join their ranks, and to speak for those he could see being written out of the narrative. White people didn’t have a monopoly on ennui. At Florida State, Jenkins had wondered whether people like him could make art films. At South by Southwest, he would prove they belonged at their center.

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