Sarah Stillman
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist
Marshall Scholar, Class of 2006 (University of Oxford)
"I’m really interested in reverting the power structures of who gets to have authority, who gets to be treated as an authority.”
-Sarah Stillman
MacArthur Genius Winning journalist
Sarah Stillman is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she covers criminal justice, immigration, climate change, and more. She teaches narrative non-fiction at Yale, where she also runs the Yale Investigative Reporting Lab. She is a MacArthur Fellow.
Stillman's work often focuses on profiteering -- in prisons, jails, immigration detention facilities, and conflict zones. She reported on extreme sentencing, winning a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for her coverage of the injustices resulting from the felony-murder rule, and running a project with the Lab to document extreme sentencing in collaboration with local newsrooms nationwide. Stillman joined The New Yorker in 2012; that same year, her piece about labor abuses on United States military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, "The Invisible Army," received the National Magazine Award for public interest and the Hillman Prize for magazine journalism. In 2019, she received another National Magazine Award for public interest, for her 2018 New Yorker piece, “No Refuge,” which documented how deportation can become a death sentence for asylum-seekers and other immigrants. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020.